Best practices

[cattysasha17]

Hi all-

I'm new to RBRX (demo) and am wondering if anyone would be so kind as to share their own usage practices. I'm somewhat lost, trying to grasp the basics of the program, and I was hoping that someone else's experience would be more illuminating than the manual. I'm especially interested in how experienced users actually use the snapshot feature and when they might update the baseline. (As well as their defrag practice.)
Again, I'm hoping an illustrated usage practice will sort things out for me.
Anyone care to shed some real world light?

As always, thanks for any insight.

-Sasha

[pvsurfer]

Hi Sasha, welcome to the forum (and to RB)!

As a new user, the very first thing I suggest you do is to click on Scheduled Tasks and then Add. Inside Select Task select Take Snapshot. Next, inside the Schedule Type, select Daily and then click the radio button At First Boot of Day. I also take a manual snapshot ('Take Snapshot') before I install anything new. That's because RB is the perfect uninstaller (by restoring that snapshot) should you find that the newly installed program isn't desirable.

Insofar as defragging goes, snapshot defrags are the only type of defragging necessary after you have installed RB. While that happens (by default) after 4 new/deleted snaphots, my preference is to have that done every 2 new/deleted snapshots. If you wish, you can make those setting changes in the 4th & 5th check boxes under Program Settings > Advanced Settings. While you should do a disk defrag before installing RB, it is neither necessary or beneficial afterwards!

That's about it. If you have other questions (or problems), there are a lot of experienced users here that will gladly try to help.

pv

[cattysasha17]

Originally Posted by pvsurfer

I also take a manual snapshot ('Take Snapshot') before I install anything new.
pv

Hi pv-
This is exactly the type of information I was looking for: How do experienced users use this program?

Originally Posted by pvsurfer

Insofar as defragging goes, snapshot defrags are the only type of defragging necessary after you have installed RB. While that happens (by default) after 4 new/deleted snaphots, my preference is to have that done every 2 new/deleted snapshots. If you wish, you can make those setting changes in the 4th & 5th check boxes under Program Settings > Advanced Settings. While you should do a disk defrag before installing RB, it is neither necessary or beneficial afterwards!

pv

This too is also a beneficial observation...I currently have my System Restore turned off (which I had to manually disable(!)) and I've also disabled the (Windows 7) Defrag schedule.

I currently have 2 Scheduled snapshots scheduled: 1 @ 1st boot (Daily) and another @ 3AM (Daily) simply because I rarely shut my system down. Is this a redundant practice? It sounds like it to me, but what drawback is an extra snapshot? Other than the implied disk space gobble?

Thanks for your response. Any insight I can glean before it comes time to make a purchase decision is very much appreciated.

-Sasha

[pvsurfer]

As far as having lots of snaps, the only downside is more consumption of disk space, so as long as you're not running out of room on your RB-protected volume there's no problem (they won't adversely affect system-performance). Btw, RB's default setting deletes unlocked snaps older than a week and you can always delete any unlocked snaps on your own.

From what I'm reading it seems to me you are doing the right things. Just one last (important) bit of advice... Don't let RB lul you into not making image-backups on a regular basis (lots written about this in other threads). As great as RB is, it's not invulnerable, and it doesn't work if your HDD won't startup!

pv

[Owl]

Something not mentioned above is the decision whether to protect the whole disk or only the system partition. If your user files are included on the system partition, or you include the user partition under RbRX protection, every time you roll back you also roll back your working files (and then have to retrieve the latest versions from the snapshot explorer).

Personally I only have RbRX on the system partition, and keep my working files separate.

Something I have yet to get to grips with are system temporary files: internet buffer, Windows update downloads, etc etc. These are changes on the system partition which consume snapshot space even when there are no program installs going on. When I have time I'm going to see about moving them to a non-RbRX partition.

There comes a time when free space on the RbRX partition is running low, and then things start going a bit haywire (unlike CTM, which just crashes). The guys advocate uninstalling RbRX, having a clean up, and the starting fresh - but I can't be bothered with that. As long as Windows is running fine and I haven't made any dubious changes lately, I just rebaseline, which is the equivalent of uninstalling RbRX to the current snapshot and reinstalling it (thus recovering all the saved snapshot space, but with no option to roll back before the rebaseline).

[pvsurfer]

Originally Posted by Owl

Something not mentioned above is the decision whether to protect the whole disk or only the system partition. If your user files are included on the system partition, or you include the user partition under RbRX protection, every time you roll back you also roll back your working files (and then have to retrieve the latest versions from the snapshot explorer).

Personally I only have RbRX on the system partition, and keep my working files separate.

Good point Owl. I do the same as you and in addition I might suggest the use of a small system partition (mine is 18 GB) which facilitates relatively fast and small raw-image backups...

pv

[CheeseHead]

I schedule RBRX to take a snapshot every hour, on the hour. I also have it set up to delete snapshots that are 2 days old. This gives me at least 24+ hours worth of snapshots at any given time. I also use a perl script that uses RBRX's command line to take a randomly named snapshot in between scheduled snapshots.

[Owl]

You're not giving yourself much opportunity to spot a problem before all the clean snapshots have been deleted. I don't understand the need to take snapshots that often - unless you are changing your system with that rapidity.

[cattysasha17]

Wow!
I think I'm a bit in over my head...PERL scripts! (Altho thank you for sharing your RBRX practice CH.) I think I need some guidance with just a couple of concepts:

• To Lock or Unlock snapshots?
• Update Baseline

The rationales behind your whens and whys would be appreciated. Very much. I see in my settings area that UNLOCKED snapshots will deleted after 7 days (default) and was wondering why also, some snapshots are created Locked and others Unlocked. I deleted my 'Take snapshot @ 3AM' and I only have a 'Daily on first boot' but RBRX seems to generate a snapshot with separate restarts.

I may be overlooking something, but I'm all ears.

As always, than you for any insights.

-Sasha

[bgoodman4]

There is relatively little utility to keeping a lot of old snaps as the likelihood that you would want to rollback many weeks or even months to a specific snapshot is rather low. You can keep some if you wish but keeping them all will eventually fill the space reserved by Rx for snapshot storage.

I have my snapshot taking functions set as follows.

Take a snap at boot and lock it.

Tack a snap each hour the PC is on but do not lock it. I do this in case I run into an issue and I will be able to rollback a short period of time (hours rather than days - and gennerally just to the most recent snap) in order to get to the point before the issue occurred.

At the end of the day I, and assuming of course I have no issues I am concerned about, I will delete all unlocked snaps. AT the same time I will unlock the daily snap from 7 days ago and delete it as well. This will leave me with 1 baseline snap, 7 boot snaps, and one hourly snap (the current one). If I do need to roll back at this point I can pick from any of the 7 days snaps and will still be able to recover any files that have been created subsequently to the selected snap. The idea is to rollback as short a period as possible and still get to a point before the issue cropped up. The reason for this is that the further back you revert your system to, the more files you will need to locate and recover from subsequent snaps. If you are going to rollback weeks or months this task may well be very difficult to accomplish and the odds you will miss a few files (or many) could be fairly high.

I hope this helps.