Uninstall/Reinstall; how often is best?

[Baldrick]

Hi All

Perhaps a silly question & one that may have been covered as part of other threads but I am interested in the consensus view as to what is the 'best' (a relative term I know) interval between uninstalling/defragging & aligning programs/files and then reinstalling RB Rx?

Personally I have no set pattern as to when I do this but am wondering if leaving it too long can affect performance/could even cause issues with the correct functioning of ones system...hence the question.

All thoughts/view/advice will be gratefully considered & reviewed.

My thanks in advance.

Balders

[carfal]

Hi Baldrick. This is a good question. I am a little like you. I dont have a set pattern as such but i guess if i think about it, i usually do it about every 2 to 3 months. If my maintenance coincides with an expected new version of Rollback to come out then i usually wait till then to do it.

I tend to look at my collective snapshot usage (Snapshot History) and do the maintenance routine when i think their using too much space. I dont like to have more than 20-30Gb locked up in snapshots because the time taken to update the baseline is directly proportionate to this. As mentioned above, because of this limitation i set myself, my maintenance happens every 2 to 3 months and takes about 30-45 min to update the baseline.

This has worked well for me.

I would like to add that in my case i find that Rollback does slow down my boot time by about 30-60sec so as a workaround i usually put my PC to sleep instead of shutdown. From a sleep state my PC is up and running in less than 5 sec! Cant beat that.

[wvbill]

I, also am very interested to hear others comments and strategies. I am far from expert it this area, but will give my thoughts in hopes to keep the discussion going.

I don’t think number of months is the primary consideration. As Carfel points out space is a major concern, I would add that number of snapshots is also a major consideration. In other words its how much your system changes and how many snapshots you have regardless of over how many months.

Of course some want to defrag often – I personally think defrag is overrated in terms of improved performance.

I have an XP desktop with 500 GB drive. Since only 120 GB are used at this time, space is not a problem. I also keep my number of snapshots at about 15 or less.

My base line goes back 16 months at this time. I take daily snapshots at first boot and lock one weekly and monthly and each 6 months. I then unlock and manually delete such that I typically have restore snapshots available so that I could go back 1-4 days, 1-3 weeks, 1-3 months, 6 months, baseline. Of course I manually take snapshots when needed – before updating, downloads, etc.

That’s my strategy. I have noticed no degrade of performance. Only negative is snapshot defrag sometimes takes 5-10 minutes – about 1 minute per snapshot.

I appreciate any comments.

Bill

[Baldrick]

Hi carfal

Thanks for the reply. I note what you say especially in terms of impact re. leaving the uninstall/defrag/reinstall for too long. I suspect that I leave things way longer than that and so will look to run one shortly and then monitor usage as you have suggested and see what the optimum time looks like for a formal maintenance routine.

Regards


Balders

[Baldrick]

Hi wvbill

You certainly seem to have thought things through...re. your use of RB Rx.

I personally snapshot every 2 hours and keep all snapshots for 6 days before they are deleted. The reasons for that is I take a full image of system drive each week and so use the RB Rx snapshots as a get out of jail free card for any problems in the week but if something extends over a week then it is a full image restore (which, because I do not use IFW, means a reinstall of RB Rx from scratch).

My baseline is not quite as old as yours but is probably over 8 months old...hence my general question on what others are doing.

My I humbly make an observation about what you are set up to do? If you do not regularly image your hard drive then I would start doing so ASAP...RB Rx is great and works in almost every case EXCEPT hard drive failure...obviously, hence the need for a back up for the back up...if yo see what I mean.

Of course, if yo do a regular image then please excuse my last paragraph.

Regards



Balders

[wvbill]

Originally Posted by Baldrick

Hi wvbill

My I humbly make an observation about what you are set up to do? If you do not regularly image your hard drive then I would start doing so ASAP...RB Rx is great and works in almost every case EXCEPT hard drive failure...obviously, hence the need for a back up for the back up...if yo see what I mean.

Balders

Yes, I second your suggestion. I do weekly and monthly backups to external drives.

In the past 5 years I have had two hard drive failures, so I know how important it is.

Thanks,

Bill

[Baldrick]

Originally Posted by wvbill

Yes, I second your suggestion. I do weekly and monthly backups to external drives.

In the past 5 years I have had two hard drive failures, so I know how important it is.

Thanks,

Bill

Hi Bill

Thought you might...but thought it best to check as we often have people using RB Rx and thinking they are completely safe...but they don't do any regular imaging (many, many moons ago...in my young, rash days...I was one of them ).

Cheers


Balders

[Owl]

I have been running RbRX for something like 18 months and I have NEVER uninstalled/reinstalled it. Don't fix what ain't broke is my motto. The only thing I have done is to rebaseline to recover my snapshot space.

[Froggie]

Greetings all! My situation is a bit unique on my "special" system. I run many active FORKS off my baseline (graphics dev, honey pot for virii chasing, my "good ol' system, etc,). This generates a requirement for an accurate RBRX system image requirement (one fork won't help). That in turn generated the need to find an imaging tool which "does it all," and that led to "Image For Windows (IFW)."

Dur to the above requirements, I auto UNLOCK snapshot 3-times daily (12, 5 and 10pm) during the week, once on Saturday and once LOCKED on Sunday. All UNLOCKED snaps are wiped at 14-days of age. This gets me my space back and completely protects my multi-fork environment. FULL IFW images are produced weekly, maintaining TWO at all times. About once a year I re-think my fork strategy and re-build the baseline at the best starting point of my "good ol" system configuration.

On simpler systems, same basic approach, but since I would like to re-baseline the system every month, I don't re-baseline. I unINSTALL to the current system image (basically the same as re-baselining), defrag the system, and if I have any system config changes due (re-partitioning, etc.), that's when they're done. Then I re-install and start over.

I've basically never found a so-called fragmented disk to be a major problem in my particular environment. The only reason I do it on simpler systems, is not necessarily to defrag file content, it's mainly to reorganize the disk so the "executables" are placed on the faster area of the disk (outer tracks)... mainly for performance enhancement after many installs.

So far, this has all worked brilliantly for me (I have blown that HoneyPot fork up many, many times) and I've never had a major disappointment, even during a recent hard disk failure (1-day after an IFW imaging oper).

It all works very, very well.

I've just started messing around with some W7 SSD configurations (many things to be aware of there in W7) and will Rollback them to death before I'm done...