Trial version of B&R 11

I downloaded and installed the trial version of B&R 11. I then created an image of the hard disk (2 partitions) of my notebook to an external hard drive. The software reported that the image was created OK.

As it turns out, my system crashed yesterday and I REALLY need to restore from the image that I thought (hoped) was going to save me someday.

From within the trial version, I created the bootable CD. It booted normally, and I ran the restore wizard. If found the archive file, but the image, ending in .005 was grayed out on the file selection line. I couldn't proceed beyond that.

Is there a limitation on the trial version that you can't restore from an image that you created? Do I have to purchase a license in order to restore from my image?

As an owner of the 10 suite, I had created a WinPE bootable CD. I booted from that CD and navigated to the image files created by B&R 11. When I selected the archive, the software reported incompatible version.

Is there any hope of using my image files? The fact that they were grayed out and not available for restoration causes me to think that maybe they weren't created correctly in the first place.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

There is now a free version of B&R11 Home. Download it and create its recovery CD and see if that works. The file formats should be the same.

I don't know what it means if the .005 one is grayed out. You should be able to select the main PFM file and it should do the rest.

It might be an issue with the Linux recovery environment. Have you restored with it before or did you always use WinPE? A fix for this would be to buy the upgrade to 11 and create its WinPE CD which hopefully would work.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I have successfully restored a B&R10 image with WinPE, but obviously not an 11 version. I did download the free version of B&R 11, and creating a recovery CD from that was next on my list. Hopefully, the file versions will be the same and I'll get lucky. In the meantime, I've installed Ubuntu 11.04 onto the notebook. I'm not loving it for a number of reasons, but that's probably for another forum.

I've used various B&R products in the past, all of which use a Linux-based boot recovery disk, and have never had a problem with them. I was actually quite surprised that I had a problem with the trial version. I wouldn't think that Paragon would disable restore from a trial version - afterall, if you're going to seriously evaluate a product with which you're plan to entrust your data, you should do a test backup and a restore - preferably on a non-critical system. Unless you've backed up your data and tested your restore capabilities, you're just hoping restore will work when you need it.

I was actually evaluating B&R 11 for a client, who had been using Maxtor Manager which doesn't run on her new Windows64 system. It had a great, simple, one click image backup as well as a simple file backup routine. Of course, Maxtor is gone and all but forgotten. I was hoping that Paragon's trial version of B&R 11 would show me enough to be able to recommend it. So far, based on my experience with the trial version, I can't justify spending my money or my client's money not knowing that it's going to work. Hopefully, the recovery CD from the free version will work.

BTW, does anyone have other recommendations for a simple, easy-to-use backup program that does both image backups as well as daily incremental file backups? I also tried the trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2011, and uninstalling it was what completely killed my system necessitating the recovery from B&R11 - the first program that I looked at.

 

It should be possible to restore from the demo version but to be honest, I don't know in the case of Paragon products. I do know that True Image had a time-limited version in Windows for evaluation and the recovery CD would only restore a previously made image which made it useless after the Windows version expired since new images couldn't be created.

 

Thanks again for the feedback. Just to close the loop, I wanted to do one more post to close the loop.

First, it was the un-installation of Acronis TI Home 2012 that trashed my system beyond booting in any mode. And while I have an older version of that running on my main system, my experience with the new version will keep me from upgrading it to the new version.

I tried the Linux version of the boot CD that I created from the B&R 11 Advanced home free product, and it had the same problem as before (*.005 grayed out), so I couldn't restore from that recovery CD either.

I contacted Paragon's sales dept, and talked to a guy who was a pre-sales engineer. He advised that in fact, the file format used in B&R 11 was different than what was used in B&R 10 - hence the problem with the B&R 10 WinPE version that I had tried to use to restore the image made by the trial version of B&R 11. However, all of the restore versions of the bootable restore CDs are backwards compatible with earlier versions of images.

He also indicated that there are more options with the WinPE recovery than with the Linux. He suggested that I buy the license for B&R 11 Home and create the WinPE CD. Like the product, the program that creates the WinPE CD requires the product number and serial number from a licensed version in order to be activated. I created the WinPE bootable CD with my newly purchased licensed and tried it. It found the archive on my external drive and recovered both of my NTFS partitions from the archive. Windows booted without a problem.

Paragon has a 30 day money back guarantee, and the purchase of the license gives you access to 30 days of phone-based tech support. The pre-sales engineer also gave me a coupon code for a 30% discount.

Bottom B&R 11 Home's image successfully recovered my notebook (about 3 hours for 75GB) after I licensed it.

 

Glad you got it working.

I used True Image for years and never had any problem with recovering using the Linux environment on any of my machines, same with a few friends but it is a weak spot in any program that uses Linux for recovery. I switched to Paragon because I only do basic full images on my C drive only and prefer other methods for backing up my data files which are not kept on C so there was no need to be paying for fancy features I never use. The Paragon Free version is all I need but some good sale offers have caused me to buy some licenses.

I think TI runs faster than Paragon but that may be machine dependent. Paragon is not without its faults but it appears to be a reasonably solid product. The user interface is better than True Image at least since TI2011 but I would just as soon these products didn't feel the need to keep a database of the archives but it makes it simpler (if it works) for people who don't know how to find an archive file on a disk.

 

I've used Paragon products for years to create images of my client's Windows server 2003 system. And, it worked as advertised when I needed it. The only problem I had with their server version appeared to be an incompatibility with VSS. When it called VSS, the server would often blue screen. I switched to Paragon's hot processing and that solved the problem.

I'm also giving Rebit 5 a shot - it looks interesting because it is a hybrid between an image and a file backup. So far, I'm not impressed, as the initial image creation takes a tremendous amount of time. I started it yesterday, about 24 hours ago, and so far, it's only about 50% complete in creating an image of a partition that has 425GB of data - that seems pretty slow - expecially for a quad core Win64 box with 8GB of memory. Paragon created a 75 GB image set on an atom-based net book in about 3 hours.

-craig-