Re: imaging software--disk dupers

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Bill,


Yes, it's a few seconds of extra trouble to take the drive out and
replace it. I wish that weren't necessary. I'm dreaming of an A/B switch
that the drive would be the input to and then cables would connect it to
either the laptop or the drive duplicator. I'll have to research whether
that exists.


I have EasyUS to make images, but I tried Shadow Protect. Looked
promising, but I got angry at it when I couldn't find a way (after 20
min. of trying and research) to do the most obvious, simplest task:
change the backup schedule. I uninstalled.


I'm sick of wasting my life on de-obfuscating bovinely stupid user
interfaces. That's one reason I like the physical machine of the
duplicator. You do it in hardware.


--Harry


That sounds like a lot of
trouble to do what Shadow Protect does without having to remove the
drive. I have it set to make a full image backup once a week (very fast
over USB 3) and incremental backups to the image every three hours.



I have several times had to do full restores.


ShadowProtect is the only system I have ever used that allowed me to
perform bulletproof, flawless restores.


I am also impressed, during several years use, at its lack of bugs and
lack of system interference.


It's an amazing program. Prior to that, I have used nearly every backup
program available either for Mac or Windows. ShadowProtect is the only
one I've consistently liked.


At 21/10/2013 16:54, you wrote:

(I tried sending this from my
iPhone, but apparently it didn't get through.)


Re your system problems (and having to roll back to April): I have found
the ultimate solution. Once a week or thereabouts I remove the drive from
my Lenovo

Thinkpad and put it in a standalone disk duplicator that copies it sector
to sector to an identically sized drive that I have also placed in the
drive duplicator. I have two extra drives that I rotate for this purpose.
After duping I of course replace the original drive in the Lenovo.
Duplicating the 250 G drive takes 20 min.


There are several disk duplicators. I happen to use the StarTech one
which is $61 at Walmart.


It's a teensy annoyance to have to take the drive out of the laptop (but
the ThinkPad makes it very easy) but it's worth it in terms of peace of
mind. If my hard drive ever crashes I can swap in the most recent dupe
and be immediately up and running with things as they were a week or two
earlier.  Then I can update the files for that week or two weeks by
using my various forms of file backup (including having most of my
folders inside Dropbox). But duping is for sys backup.


Sent from my iPhone


On Oct 17, 2013, at 3:49 PM, J R FOX
mailto:jr_fox@xxxxxxxx
wrote:


[First off, let me mention to
all that for some years now I have used dedicated webmail gateways
(proprietary to the provider) for my email.  Fairly recently, they
drastically changed their whole interface -- very much for the worse --
and with the messages posted to some lists I got reports of objectionable
HTML-type gobbledygook in the quoted material.  I've taken to
reformatting said material to get around that, but it is more
time-consuming and a pain in the rear.  If you notice such funky
stuff here, and it bothers you, I can take the aforementioned
counter-measures,, including reducing quoted portions to a bare
minimum.]


Michael, I have no vested interest in championing Acronis.  They are
just one of the major players still standing.  (Is GHOST still on
the market ?)  I am aware of some more esoteric competing programs,
such as Dantz Retrospect.  On the one hand, I have never experienced
the problems you cite with Acronis . . .  but then, I have *never*
installed it, anywhere.  I run a self-booting CD of Acronis Media
Pack 2012, which operates outside of Windows, and must carry its own
mini-OS, most likely Linux-based.  This has all or most of the
Acronis programs on it.  The only one of these that would need to be
installed is their boot mediator, Acronis OS Selector.  (My one,
limited experience with that cannot be regarded as a success.) 
Therefore, so far as I know, no registry keys ever come into
play.


On the other hand, I don't recall ever having to rely upon the restore
half of Acronis TI usage, for a *critical* salvage operation.  (I
have used it for cloning to other hard drives, such as replacing one that
was starting to exhibit alarming SMART errors, to a new and somewhat
larger HDD.)  So, I can't certify it as anything approaching
"bullet-proof."  If it is not, I would certainly like to
change over to relying on some other program that pretty much _is_, for
this vital backup category.  We are not really talking about backing
up your important data here: any capable file manager program can do
that, under manual control.  I happen to use ZTreeWin for
this.  What we are dealing with here is being able to put back your
boot partition in one clean shot, and have it work again -- at least as
per its state at the time the image was made -- rather than having to
spend a couple weeks re-installing Windows from scratch, applying all of
the MS security fixes, installing all of your apps, your personal
desktop, user preferences etc., which to my mind amounts to cruel and
unusual punishment !  (And Yes, it really has taken me about that
long.)


This may have another test shortly, as something has severely impaired
the 64-bit Win-7 I had on one box, making it all but unusable. 
Almost nothing opens now, I can't invoke Win Restore Points, can't run an
AV scan, and so forth.  Curiously enough, I think the damage was
done by a slew of MS patches, all applied at once.  If booting up in
Safe Mode and removing them does not do the trick, I may have to resort
to an Acronis image from last April.  I *should have* made one more
recent  for that computer, but never did.  Scrubbing off the
existing boot partition and putting that April one on will be a
risk.  But it will be much better than nothing.  This would be
more of a test for Acronis TI than restoring to untouched iron, I
think.  More that could go wrong, anyway.  I may even get to
that today.


Please excuse the lengthy OT post, but some may find it
beneficial.




   Jordan



From: Michael Norman
mailto:michael.norman@xxxxxxxx
>
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 9:56 AM
Subject: RE: imaging software
Beware Acronis. If you read their forum, and other security forums,
such as
Wilders, you will see what I discovered the hard way. Acronis True
Image
Home makes fundamental changes to your Opsys and is devilishly
difficult to
uninstall, leaving behind a lot of registry entries that, for me,
caused
havoc with USB flash drives not being recognized. I had ATIH10 and
finally
got enough of it uninstalled (the regular uninstall is worthless) to
correct
the problem, but it took a lot of troubleshooting. And I still have
Acronis
junk in my registry. Whenever I use their co-called cleanup utility
(which
also requires you to edit, on your own, additional registry keys the
cleanup
program, for some reason, misses), I get a BSOD and have to invoke a
restore
point. I've disabled all Acronis services and the junk that's left in
the
registry is not throwing off any admin event warnings or errors, so
I'm
going to leave the registry alone. I even had to toss two USB drives
that
would not work on the Win7 machine that once had Acronis on it. They
work
fine on any other machine, but on the PC that had Acronis they kept
throwing
of Event ID 11 errors that named an Acronis process/driver. I'll be
troubleshooting this, I reckon, for some time.
I did not replace Acronis with another imaging program. Instead I
installed
a 2TB NAS on the system and, using Second Copy, backup all important
data
and the like to that every day, then, to be doubly safe (I'm in the
middle
of a complex project and have a lot of data), I subscribed to one of
the
online backup services, SOS, for the length of time of the
project.


Michael Norman




Jordan,
There are various imaging software programs on the market, Acronis
being one
of them. I know of none designed for home users (though there may of
course
be such); the main market is for industrial strength networks which
have to
restore training computers, for example, to original state after the
training is completed. Try google.
Cheers,
Flash