v10 ?

[Froggie]

Originally Posted by Owl

My first hard drive was 20MB lol - maybe you mean 450milliBytes

When you had that 20mB hard disk, digital music and video were almost non-existant, and high level software development languages (which are basically very inefficient in code generation) didn't really exist yet.

About the only thing you could fill that sucker up with was text-based P-O-R-N ... and it would take an awful lot to do that.

Ahhhh... the days of simplicity.

[7leagueboot]

Froggie, thanks for your detailed reply. You have really gone the extra mile for me here!

Well I have to say I still didn't understand the discussion about imaging. To be honest, I haven't a clue what all these are: ATI, IFW, IFL, DS, etc.? I do however believe that maybe if I rollback to baseline and then install Acronis TI I could clone the system to an external drive. The only thing that has stopped me doing this until know is that I seem to remember RB doesn't care to have Acronis products on the system. It had a fit when I had TI installed on my Vista based Inspiron and had a second crisis when I tried installing Disk Director. Strangely, it didn't complain with Paragon's offering. Maybe it is racist towards Acronis products?

I believe we may have been talking at cross-purposes because when I experienced the loss of all snapshots after rolling back to the baseline, I was using RB v8.1. I have never tried it with v9.1. Also, v8.1 was on my previous Inspiron which only had 1 drive. My current laptop is a heap of junk from Alienware. RB 9.1 seems to work fine with it even though HDS say that RAID is not supported. But then I'm not the ony person who finds that it works perfectly with RAID 0. This forum as many making the same claim.

I'm curious about something. In RB's GUI there is an option to defrag snapshots. I have never used this before so I'm not sure how it works, especially as there are no snapshots listed, just all my protected partitions. So, if I use that will it defrag the current system? If not, can I take a snapshot of the current system, then defrag it, and finally rollback to that last snapshot?

Incidentally, regarding whether RB works with RAID 0, in defrag snapshot view all my partitions are displayed as protected which tends to suggest that RB does see both drives as one when in a RAID 0 configuration.

[Froggie]

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

Well I have to say I still didn't understand the discussion about imaging. To be honest, I haven't a clue what all these are: ATI, IFW, IFL, DS, etc.?

It's the infamous TECH world of acronyms...
ATI = Acronis TRUE IMAGE
IFW = Image For Windows
IFL = Image For Linux
DS = Drive Snapshot

...etc. They are all imaging programs.

Various imaging programs installed with Rollback can sometimes produce some very strange stuff for backup images. When all my imaging tests were complete, I decided on "Image For Windows"... the most predictable HOT and COLD imaging amongst the ones I tried. For COLD imaging, both IFW and DS, when using their ALL SECTORS options, does an excellent job of completely imaging a Rollback system and all its snapshots.. both providing for a complelely accurate restoration.

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

I do however believe that maybe if I rollback to baseline and then install Acronis TI I could clone the system to an external drive. The only thing that has stopped me doing this until know is that I seem to remember RB doesn't care to have Acronis products on the system. It had a fit when I had TI installed on my Vista based Inspiron and had a second crisis when I tried installing Disk Director. Strangely, it didn't complain with Paragon's offering. Maybe it is racist towards Acronis products?

I have stopped using all Acronis products with my RB protected system... way to unpredictable.

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

RB 9.1 seems to work fine with it even though HDS say that RAID is not supported.

RAID 0 is an innocuous configuration, usually set up in the BiOS... to the system it looks like one big disk. My guess is HDS won't have a problem with that particular RAID... other RAID configs, beware.

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

I'm curious about something. In RB's GUI there is an option to defrag snapshots. I have never used this before so I'm not sure how it works, especially as there are no snapshots listed, just all my protected partitions. So, if I use that will it defrag the current system?

Feel free to use the option... it's just a manual version of the automatic stuff that can go on based on OPTION configuration. It will defrag all snapshots AND the current configuration on any protected drives, but to take effect the system must be rebooted when the RB defrag is completed. The space isn't re-gathered until the RB console runs at restart time.

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

Incidentally, regarding whether RB works with RAID 0, in defrag snapshot view all my partitions are displayed as protected which tends to suggest that RB does see both drives as one when in a RAID 0 configuration.

It looks to me like "Mikey likes RAID 0!" (cultural reference... don't dig too deep for it)

[7leagueboot]

Originally Posted by Froggie

other RAID configs, beware

I'm not sure why you would say that. RAID 1 just mirrors HDD0 to HDD1 and as RB only protects HDD0 that's all that's needed. HDD1 would contain the exact same data to include RB and all its snapshots.

I'm trying to imagine where this could go wrong?

BTW, when you talk of Image for Windows, I assume you mean the backup option that comes with Windows. If that's the case, it has given me hell. As I said earlier, I have 2 x 500 Gb drives in RAID 0. I also have a 1 To external drive which I tried using to clone the baseline with. It threw up an error saying that the destination drive must be at least the same size as the drive being backed up. Well it was and it had nothing on it! Nevertheless, I had read that Windows option was superior to ATI so I went on Amazon and ordered a 2 To drive. That should cover it, right? When it arrived I tried again but got the same error message. And yes, both drives were correctly NTFS formatted. At that point I gave up with Image for Windows.

Got any pointers on how to do that successfully because it seems too easy to me and yet it wouldn't work?

[Owl]

I don't understand this RAID business. I had a RAID motherboard once, it handled all the spanning and mirroring internally and just presented itself as a normal drive to the rest of the system - the OS or anything else was none the wiser. If I needed to do any RAID maintenance that was a hot-key at boot to get into the utilities.

I thought I was well OK with a hardware mirrored config, but then a power glitch took out my PSU which then fried both drives (doh!).

[7leagueboot]

Tell me about it! I had an online service hosted by Datapipe on a dedicated server with RAID +1. It was supposed to be equipped with 8 drives. 4 of those would stripe to the rest. They told me it was foolproof and allowed for hot-swapping of defective drives with no system downtime.

One day the server appeared to be down so I called support. 24 hrs later hey came back to me and informed me that 7 of the 8 drives had failed at he same time which, according to them was a chance in 100 million. All data had been lost!

Anyway, RAID 0 is the most risky because with data striped across both making a single drive, if one fails you lose everything. The upside is the speed. It seems to write about 10x faster than it did in AHCI mode. So to protect myself I backup everything I do to 2 external drives as I do anything. Backup in triplicate may sound a bit paranoid but at least I feel safe. If I ever lose one of my main drives I will only lose Windows which I can reinstall anyway.

[Froggie]

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

BTW, when you talk of Image for Windows, I assume you mean the backup option that comes with Windows.

No, sir... I mean "Image For Windows," an imaging product from Terabyte Unlimited.

Drive Image Backup Software for Windows :: Image for Windows

[bgoodman4]

Originally Posted by Froggie

As far as uninstalling for purposes of defragging, there are many on this forum (moi included) who would say this isn't necessary. As long as Rollback is deleting/defragging its snapshots, the system's disk surface remains pretty clean.

Not my experience at all,,,,, as I understand it defraging snapshots just defrags the snapshots, not the drive itself. Thats why the process is so quick.

[7leagueboot]

Originally Posted by Froggie

No, sir... I mean "Image For Windows," an imaging product from Terabyte Unlimited.

Drive Image Backup Software for Windows :: Image for Windows

Aha, that changes everything! Now I know why it would never work.
Ok, so before I whip out the credit card, can you explain this a little better to me please: "Restored Partition Expansion - When restoring an image, you can expand the restored partition to occupy any free space that would be left over."

Why would you want to do that or are they talking about restoring to a different sized drive (as in larger)? I'm getting confused here because if the image is an exact replica of your existing drive/s there shouldn't be any free space outside of the original partitions when restoring, should there?

[Owl]

Originally Posted by 7leagueboot

Why would you want to do that or are they talking about restoring to a different sized drive (as in larger)?

Got it in one.