what backup program would you use if you didnt care about the money

There's a very good reason (other than familiarity) for preferring Macrium Reflect over IFW: it produces a mountable image. The fact that IFW images cannot be mounted is a definite weakness in an otherwise fine product. IFW's strengths are offset by inelegant design

 

IFW images can indeed be mounted as virtual drives. It uses and application called TBImount.

 

i tried ifw its okay. the thing i dont like is all the separate apps needed. like as said above to browse you need to install the app for that etc...

 

There is, since recently, a TBIMount add on that adds virtual drive mounting from an image. Or you may use TBIView if you don't want to add yet another driver to your system.

 

Wow. It appears that no one actually reads threads before they post. I said that already.

 

Nope, you just mentioned TBIView and not TBImount a few messages above. And I learned from Wilders, maybe exactly from your post, that TBImount was released. So people do read theads, but when there are 56 posts in them, and you have the exact answer to a question asked, you don't re-read them, at least for me.

 

Depending on whether you come from a user point-of-view versus a technician point-of-view (or are just an old DOS person), the inelegant design IS its greatest strength.

 

Members of this forum are now aware of TBIMount. One of the strengths of the longstanding TBIView is you can explore (and extract) files in images made of other operating systems. For example, you are in WinXP and you have images of Linux and DOS partitions. You can view and extract files and folders in these images without leaving WinXP. I find that very handy.

TBIMount will allow access to DOS but not Linux images from Windows.

 

zfactor,

IFW, TBIView and TBIMount are now installed from a single setup.exe. I understand why some folks may not like the modular nature of the apps but I love it. TeraByte has a few dozen modules. You only have to use what interests you. Many modules are of interest only to enthusiasts.

 

ill chck it out again then and see, thanks

 

@zfactor

I think your friend is making a mistake if he doesn't at least try out the top backup/DR products. They all have free trials. Give them a go and pick the one which best fits his needs.

For personal use, downtime during disasters, and work interruption/delay (such as rebooting to make your backup, etc) aren't usually a huge problem, but for a business, you should only consider products which minimize work interruption, and downtime during disasters. In my mind, this means that you should only consider backup products which reliably support at least these two features:

1) some form of fast incremental imaging

Businesses need frequent backups, and they also need usable/responsive servers (not servers which are regularly bogged down doing slow diff/comparison-based backups). With fast incremental imaging, your incrementals will take seconds or minutes, rather than hours (or days with multi-TB volumes).

2) a mechanism to restore backups to completely different hardware (aka "HIR")

Without HIR, a business will have to build up a replacement server by installing the operating system and applications, and then restore the backed up data files. Reconstructing a machine in this way can be a very time consuming task. HIR makes it possible to get the entire machine (operating system, applications, and data files) up an going in one fell swoop. Now you'll find that none of the various HIR implementations out there are perfectly effective (some of them actually have a high percentage of failures). This is because HIR itself is more of an art form than a science. There are a lot of special details that have to be tweaked just right for it to work effectively. You'll want to pick a product which has a high percentage of success with HIR restores.

There are a lot of other features that I would say are very important for the business, but these two I feel are the absolute most important.

 

Could I trouble you for for the names of programs with a high percentage of HIR restore successes as well as suggestions as to what sort of tweaks you may be referring to?

Also I agree with you that it makes the most sense to try all of the top programs and then pick the one that suits you the best. Just because a lot of folks like a particular program does not mean you will. For example I know a lot of folks like Macrium but I did not like the fact that you had to go to a 2nd program (or 2) in order to create a rescue disk. I feel this function should be built into a back-up program and so Macrium was out of the running. Personally I like ShadowProtect the best with Paragon as runner up. For instant imaging and recovery my choice is RollBack Rx. I selected my program preferences after testing probably a 1/2 dozen top rated programs so I know the programs I selected are the best for me. This is not a popularity contest after all, its a "what will get the job done to my liking" contest, and the only way to determine the best program for this particular requirement is to try them and find out.

Other folks opinions can serve as a guide but IMO thats about it.

 

Maybe you mean StorageCraft's ShadowProtect?

Macrium can burn both the linux and WinPE based rescue disk directly to CD, although you need the full version for the WinPE builder.

If you are referring to the BartPE plugin then obviously that requires BartPE software (or Reatogo), but the idea is to let you build a custom rescue disk. For example, I built one with my favorite defrag programs, ChkDsk type utilities and Acronis, Macrium, ShadowProtect and Image for Windows, plus extra drivers for all my computers (including for vmware), and TeamViewer for remote support. I've built other rescue disks that also included anti-virus programs, web browsers, software to reset password (in case I get locked out), partition tools, etc. IMO, every backup program should offer a BartPE plugin.

 

he has bought and is using shadow protect now and is very happy with it. for him is was a easy choice after talking with them and knowing he can call them any time he wants with the extra coverage. he said they made him feel very comfortable about everything and answered all of his questions. he was on the phone with them for a good while lol.

im still to this day myself torn between macrium and shadow protect i own and use both at different times simply because i like them both and i always like a change but i have never once had either fail on me yet.

 

maybe he means the winpe add in installer for macrium. if you decide you dont want the extra program installed technically you could install it create the disc then remove the pe plugin and everything else still works fine you just dont get the updates for your winpe disc after that unless you reinstall it. i see no reason myself for not having the pe plugin not installed though

 

I'm so biased on this issue that I fear any response I give would be suspect. That's why I've tried to discuss this in generalities. As to the tweaks, well I can't discuss those without violating my non-disclosure agreement (background: I'm one of the engineers who made ShadowProtect, and DriveImage/V2i Protector as well (now known as Ghost after Symantec acquired PowerQuest)).

 

I'm not sure exactly which product you're referring to here. If you're referring to ShadowProtect, then I understand this, because although we provide the .ISO image for you to burn (to create your recovery enviornment CD) our docs and support folks often point users to various third-party CD ISO burning tools to do the actual burning. This isn't really necessary if you have installed ShadowProtect because in the ShadowProtect directory you'll find a tool called ISOTool.exe which can be used to burn your .ISO file to a CD-R. I recently bumped into the guy who posts the ISO packages on the download servers and was discussing the fact that we have our own ISO burning tool (ISOTool.exe) and this took him by surprise (he didn't realize it) and he said he'd like to include it along with the ISO itself, so I imagine this will be done in the not-too-distant future.

 

grnxnm what is the most current version os the winpe iso? has it not been updated to 3.5.1 yet just curious as i have 3.5.0 i believe. thanks

 

Drive snapshot

 

Slightly off-topic, but for anyone who needs a tool to put a WinPE based rescue CD/ISO on a USB flash drive, check out PeToUsb.

I mention it because some of the backup programs support "burning" the rescue disk directly to flash drives while others do not, and while I like that feature, the lack of it is not a deal breaker for me since there are lots of free utilities available for transferring iso boot disks to USB.

Note: If you have a ram drive or similar, you may need to remove it temporarily when using PeToUsb, otherwise the program may confuse it for a Flash drive.

Note2: Your computer (bios) needs to support booting from a USB hard drive. Older computers generally do not even if they support booting to iso-based flash boot sticks that you can create with Pe2Usb or FlashBoot type programs.

p.s. for non-WinPE based rescue disks, you can try unetbootin.

 

Active@ Disk Image does it for me; its Windows PE works great!

dja2k

 

Agreed 1000% It is simple yet very effective. There are some features needed, such as the ability to mount images as virtual drives and incremental imaging. I'm working with LSoft on a new version right now. So stay tuned.

Also, the recovery disc if the best you'll find anywhere.

 

Actually I did mean Macrium. When I tried it I was not able to burn any rescue disk without going to an outside program. I should mention that I did not spend very much time trying to do so since I was expecting to simply hit an icon and be walked through the process. For me this was a deal killer and so I looked elswhere.

 

OK, thanks. ------- I guess I will just stick with what I have ------ that would be SP ------ and just keep my fingers crossed.

 

Well, as noted above I was not referring to SP as I am using it. I do not now recall how I created the rescue disk but I am pretty sure I did not go to any 3rd party program to do it. I must have used the ISOTool.exe tool which I guess in some sense could be seen as an outside program rather than integral to SP.