Alternative to True Image (nervous nellie)

I should've avoided any confusion and attached it to begin with
Thanks for the verify workaround. I'll try it out tomorrow.

The manual backup jobs were all based on 2 partitions (C:\ and D:\) which reside on the same physical disk. I think all the jobs were slight variations because I played around with the encryption and file sizes (you can manually specify a chunk size, so I wanted to see if it worked).

If you want, I can send you screenshots of each manual task tomorrow. Just send me a PM with an email address.

 

Can you tell me exactly what happened when you hit F6? Did it prompt you to feed in your miniport driver diskette? If so, did it then issue any errors? The F6 option is a part of WinPE itself, and unfortunately we don't have much control over it other than reporting issues we see to Microsoft's WinPE team. If you hit F6 in time, you should get a new screen that deals with loading third party storage drivers. If you don't see this screen, then you probably didn't hit F6 in time. Check your keyboard too, if you're using for instance a Microsoft Natural keyboard, the F(unction) keys won't be on by default. You'll want to make sure that the moment your machine comes on that you lock your F keys to be on. Silly things like this often prevent users from successfully using F6.

Also, did you try booting the recovery environment with Maximum configuration support? It's possible that your host bus adapter's miniport is already present in the max config option.

 

Hi,

I've been using Drive Image 7 for several years, and it seems to work fine (I can mount the images, but I never had to restore one). Would I gain something by buying abother backup app, like TI, BING or whatever?

I'm willing to install FDISR now that they have an I18N version, but I can't afford any downtime, like, if something goes haywire during install. Therefore, I need an *exact* image (or clone) of my whole HD, to a dedicated backup HD, before playing around with FDISR. What is the best software to do this?

Thanks,

-RE

 

@reve etrangeThese work:
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/
http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

and this ( )
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/copywipe.html : FREE

From the news group

HTH

 

@autokilo
sorry for my "fanboy" post re BING earlier
you obviously have high level expertise

@all
this discussion re Shadowprotect is intruiging
Couple of asks:
what is point of imaging app where images cannot be validated till restore which could fail : although I see this is possible with complex work around.

fools rush in...
The discussion is well beyond my level now, will try and keep mouth shut and learn
Thx

Regards.

 

TY Longboard.

What are basically the pros and cons of the three products you mentionned?
It looks like copywipe is a sort of *nix 'dd', but it's free; what about the two others?

-RE

 

@longboard
No need to apologise Thanks for the helpful post. I had considered BING before but wasn't too keen on the idea of having another partition just for BING, hence my preference for IFD. The lack of MBR support in IFD is one of the reasons I'm considering ShadowProtect over IFD.

I'm not sure I qualify as having "high level expertise". I'm just a software developer by profession

As for ShadowProtect and verification only taking place at restore - I think this is an oversight (please correct me if I'm wrong) that grnxnm and the people at StorageCraft are well aware of (hence the upcoming verification tool in a major release).

 

Your key issue is certainty about your ability to restore?

Given your need I would just buy another disk and clone it using DI or any of the free cloning apps take the old disk out and then play with FD on the new disk.

If you have problems - it will take 5 mins to put the old disk in.

 

So are you saying that even after you successfully loaded the miniport drivers within the WinPE boot session, using F6 (with no errors reported during this process by WinPE itself), you were still unable to see your drives? Double check to make sure that the diskette you used is the correct, latest version, setup/install diskette for your storage controller, and contains a txtsetup.oem file as well as the .inf and .sys files for your miniport driver, if not more files (such as .cab file(s), .cat file(s), some DLLs, etc). If the diskette is correct, but still doesn't seem to work with F6, then we'll have to add your storage controller's driver to our WinPE CD. Zip up and send all of the contents of your miniport diskette to us, along with the full make/model of your strorage controller. The SP2 recovery environment has about 30 more storage controller drivers added to it (many SCSI/RAID controller drivers), which will load using the Max config boot of the recovery environment.

Oh, also, I should mention that the Desktop Recovery Environment is a Windows Server 2003-flavored WinPE. This means that you need the Windows Server 2003 version of the miniport diskette for your storage controller, even if you don't use Windows Server 2003 on your actual computer. If you can't find a Server 2003 miniport diskette, then one for XP usually works.

We're looking into a means that will allow customers to easily add new drivers to their own recovery environment CD.

 

RAID testing has been deferred for now. I wanted to do a full blat and restore test. Here's what I've done:

1) Created images of C:\ and D:\ in Windows using ShadowProtect.
2) DBAN'd my physical disk. The disk has no MBR, partitions and is now marked as unformatted.
3) Booted off the Recovery Environment.
4) Started Restore wizard for C:\, right clicked the unformatted drive to create a primary (active) partition at the beginning of the disk (it creates one that is the correct size as the image). Proceeded to restore.
5) Started Restore wizard for D:\. Here's where it seems odd because I cannot right click and create a Extended partition (all available options are for primaries).

To get round this, I have to create another Primary partition using the maximum size possible, which is listed. Entering anything less throws an error (I assume this is because it is validating the of the partition against the size of the image - grnxnm, can you confirm is this is the case?). I then proceed to delete the partition. Now I can right click and create a extended partition using all of the remaining free space. I then proceed to restore the D:\ image.

6) Booted into XP successfully. Binary diff with Beyond Compare passes fine.

@grnxnm - is the process for step 5 correct? do I need to create a second primary, delete in order to create a extended partition for my D:\ restore?

@all - if others feel this discussion regarding ShadowProtect isn't relevant to this thread or detracting from the purpose of the thread, let me know and I'll take this discussion elsewhere. If others feel this is beneficial, I'll be happy to create another thread, otherwise I'll take this to PM / email with grnxnm.

 

If you can, include the final size of the image files along with the timings. This helps to better guage what's being done. For instance, if one product has a significantly smaller file than another product, due to better compression, but takes the same amount of time, then that's the preferable case. If you use encryption, be sure to use the same algorithm with both products, if possible, when comparing them. ShadowProtect allows for 128 bit encryption using RC4 or AES.

 

I don't know the answer to that one. I'll have to check it out and get back to you on it.

 

I wonder what the timing would have been have you run both from a BartPE CD. Both of them run faster for me on BartPE but not like a difference of 22 miutes versus 90 minutes, much less 6 hours. Something sounds off about that 6 hours. I've never had IFD or IFW either one do nearly that badly compared to ATI even with byte-for-byte verify.

 

Hi,
I have a Q, whether Cloning and Image Restore of system partition have same result from practical point of view?

Thanks

 

@aigle

?Some A to your Q

Images for back-up and restore: depending on config: instant recovery, or specific set-ups at point in time, utilities may need functional OS or not.
Space issues!!

Copy for migrating system to new HD or say keep bootable virgin install of basic OS and apps as back-up. Creating new copy of sopmething to install over multiple boxes. Can be set-up to simply overwrite previous "copy" on specific partition.

In reality depending on what you want you could use "Copy" as back-up.

I think imaging/snapshot technology has developed significantly, while depending on GUI and pretty colours; copy utilities relatively stable and most offer very similar functionality.

Some of the "less popular" utilities ie not Acronis or Symantec have less complicated/flashy utilities with less bloat that with some user interaction can accomplish a lot either way

Regards,
There are v.good free copy utilities all over the net.

 

thanks for explaining.

By the way I am waware of only copy wipe from terabyte.

 

I eventually used copywipe, and bought the terabyte bundle, since there have been so few complaints about it (besides GUI). I cloned my main HD, and made images of my partitions with IFW.

Well, it does what it says. I wouldn't advise these progs to my grandma though - you gotta have a clue how your computer work. I agree that userfriendliness could have been improved (though I appreciated the mouseless navigation), but the name of the game is reliablity here, so I guess I can live with the antique DOS interfaces and 8+3 files all in caps.

I also tried Casper by the way, but It couldn't clone my HD due to a FAT32 partition (that I use to share docs and emails between Ubuntu and XP).

-RE

 

@grnxnm - I used a differential to validate the image. nothing is displayed in the log so I assume the validation is transparent to the end user. The time taken for the differential to take place is substantially longer than making a backup (which i guess is natural as it's doing a diff between the image and the drive, then determining what the differences are).

Is there a crc associated with the image as a whole? If so, is there a way to determine the crc of the image and perform the verification ourselves using a crc tool of our choice? It just seems cumbersome / slow to have to perform a differential to verify an image...

One last question - you mentioned there was an upcoming release due shortly but that this is not the SP2 which contains the verification tool. Is there a changelog or would it be possible for you to share what has gone into the upcoming release?

The verification point is a potential deal-breaker for me... which seems to be a shame because everything else seems good.

 

@Aigle
Not sure how effective my explanations are, but thankyou

Here is a start with some free apps:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

Realistically I wouldn't go past Copy/wipe: works small free.

Regards

 

Currently testing backup and restore of system parition with my hard drives configured for AHCI (which allows NCQ, hot swap etc), which usually requires a floppy disk containing the miniport drivers.

I was able to specify my AHCI drivers during the loadup of the Recovery Environment (usually I just keep hitting F6 until it appears) and the restore went smoothly. While restoring, I paid more attention to the logging going on and it looks as though the restore is applied then the CRC check takes place afterwards. grnxnm, please correct if I'm wrong, but the way entries are being logged gives the impression that that is the case.

Let me emphasise, every backup I've restored with ShadowProtect has been successful.

I've successfully booted into XP and the system seems on inspection exactly as I left it (I installed some software and drivers after making the restore and they have been reverted). Binary diff between the drive and the image has yielded no differences except for those due to me having logged into XP again.