Calculation of "Free Space" for snapshot auto-deletion

[soccerdog8]

At this point, this is what my snapshot list looked like. Note the "N/A" sizes of the last two snapshots.



Strangely, finding the list through the GUI console displayed the sizes correctly.



Then, following Carfal's advice, I defragged the snapshots to make sure I couldn't free up any space. This succeeded, surprisingly. I had figured Rollback would die trying to defrag them.



And afterwards, the commandline shows that the snapshots were still the same size. So, as I suspected, there are no changes in common across snapshots, since each one holds individual data specific to that snapshot. And, I got the errors after there were enough snapshots to overrun the free space on the WinXP partition.



After getting to Windows and trying to perform these manual fixes myself, I tried restoring to Baseline again and got those same old errors.


Conclusion:
This is a Rollback bug. Rollback doesn't start deleting snapshots until free space is low across all partitions, and yet if free space gets too low on any one of the partitions, Rollback dies trying to save data on that one overfull partition. Rollback should either check for free space on EACH partition, and delete snapshots until that worst case partition has as much free space as was specified in the program settings; OR follow their own convention for calculation of free space across all partitions and let snapshots be distributed across partitions as well. Actually what I think would be best would be to be able to specify for each partition how much free space there needs to be. There would have to be some new GUI feature to set this configuration, but I don't think the background coding would be all that difficult.

Anyway, I don't want to come across like I'm complaining. I realize I'm asking more from Rollback than any normal person ever should, and it does work better than anything else on the market. It's just that in this very specific case, Rollback doesn't perform as advertised or as I think it should.

Thanks, and I hope this helps!
SoccerDog

[carfal]

Thankyou for that indepth analysis Soccerdog8!

I agree that Rollback has a major problem if your HD fills up. I personally have not had the fustration of this issue so i cant speak from experience.

Horizon should look into improving Rollback when a full disk occurs however i imagine that this is very tricky to manage accurately. Perhaps they should not wait for an actual full disk to occur before Rollback attempts to take actions. I'm thinking a 5Gb trigger point would be more reliable? What say you Horizon?

In any event, the current error messages you were receiving would most likely be linked to the fact that your HD was full.

The safest course of action in the mean time would be to get into the Rollback boot console and delete some snapshots. Then run the Rollback defrag (very important). Now reboot (select "Exit").

This should free up space again.

[soccerdog8]

Originally Posted by carfal

The safest course of action in the mean time would be to get into the Rollback boot console and delete some snapshots. Then run the Rollback defrag (very important). Now reboot (select "Exit").

Oh don't worry, I've screwed up Rollback more than enough times to know how to recover from something like this

But this was an especially bad failure. I tried several times to restore to baseline and failed. Then I deleted all the snapshots by hand through the recovery console and defragged them. Even after that, I couldn't boot into windows, I got a "Bad MBR" error.

Thankfully once I uninstalled from the subconsole to the baseline snapshot, everything went back to normal (before this installation). That's one of my favorite things about Rollback actually: no matter how badly I screw it up, they're really good about actually getting the machine back to a good state when you uninstall to baseline. Most people would probably rather die than use that feature, but for me it's no big deal. Way to go with the reliable failsafe Rollback!

[HDS-Jacob]

Carfal, I'll pass this along to the team.

SoccerDog, thanks for the comprehensive posts and feedback.

Jacob

[iceman]

Thanks soccerdog8, i love your comments...!!