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Re: imaging software--disk dupers



Harry, you must have been in a bad mood when you tried this. It takes
three seconds to change the schedule. In the backup TAB, choose EDIT.
Sancta simplicitas. Believe me, it is a lot simpler than H/W. Also much
more flexible BECAUSE, for example, you can set it up to do a full IMAGE
once a week, and do an incremental image whenever you like, which in my
case is every three hours. This can be intensely valuable when you MUST
restore something you lost before your last full backup. I admit that the
ShadowProtect interface is non-standard, but it really, truly, is simple.
Most impressive is the program's ability to recover from any error
gracefully, for example if the drive is not present, etc. etc. It is
truly the ONLY bulletproof backup solution I have encountered since the
dawn of the microcomputer. I have tried them all, Mac and PC. H/W won't
do incremental. I'm sorry, but I cannot regard that as a satisfactory
solution.

At 28/10/2013 12:59, you wrote:
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