Thinkpads Forum

Hi

I used Rescue and Recovery previously on my T60
but It failed to restore my system back the windows Xp boot
screen stays forever! now I'm thinking of using it again
but I'm afraid that i will lose all of my stuff again and it came to my mind that i always turn off system restore is it related to R&R?

please advice me and thanks in advance!

I have tried using R&R before on my T43 and found it weird and unreliable.

After several backups (to a 2nd HD in the ultrabay) it would stop working and complain the disk was full, when it wasn't.

When I got my current T60p, I also bought Acronis True Image. Much better option than R&R. Restores properly too - the entire HD or selected files.

If you don't trust a piece of software, don't use it. Backup is about peace of mind after all.

Windows system restore is not related to R&R.

But as the previous poster noted R&R has always had issues, which usually only show up when you really need it. I use R&R but only as a "backup buckup." My primary backup software is TrueImage which is much less quirky and gives me peace of mind. If I were relying on R&R alone I would not sleep well at night.

Ed Gibbs

zern & egibbs thank you both for the informative reply ill try
true image

Here is my two cents.

I had my T60 crashed by installing a piece of malicious software, of course, without knowing it.

I had had a backup made with R&R (thank god for that) and another with Acronis.

Acronis backup was useless because I was not able to boot WinXP. But R&R let me restore everyting to the date when I made the last backup.

I'm currently wondering about using RR or not. Reason is that I gave it a test to see how it worked and at first I thought it worked as hoped. But, then today when init the backup on one ThinkPad (it only had 1 and the init backup made) it started of to scan throught the drive for almost 3 hours and then the backup itself to a NAS took around 30-45 minutes. The later I can live with, but having to wait for almost 3 hours before making the backup will make most users to click the nice option called Cancel. Suggestion thoughts here would be nice.

Also I'm comparing with Symantec Ghost (that they haven't destroyed yet) that makes the init backup and it takes a while as well. But, the next one the users init the backup it's actually starts to make the file backup directly.

Above from mentioned software what are you're suggestion for backup software?

I use Acronis TrueImage. It's fairly quick and very reliable. Try it and see if you like it.

Ed Gibbs

Ed, how quick is it to either scan or get on with the next incrementell backup?

It took me ten minutes to do an incremental backup with R&R this morning. I used an USB external hard drive as the backup disk.

I'm running with the RR v3.10.0030.00 and think that is the latest version downloadable. So curious, what version are you running with?

R&R version: 3.10.0022.00

khaverblad wrote:I'm currently wondering about using RR or not.

I've read to many reasons for not to use it.

[...] Above from mentioned software what are you're suggestion for backup software?

Since couple of yrs I get along w/ Acronis Trueimage starting from 6 over 7 and 8 up to version 9. And what shall I say: it has never let me down. Means it's reliable enough to do my major backups/images of the T60. For instance: a full backup of 30GB on a external USB 2,5" drive takes approx. 30 Minutes using high compression on a 1,83Ghz CoreDuo. You might run it in background while doing your work simultaneously - no problem at all.

I really recommend using it - it's more an image tool than a backup application (i.e. Veritas Backup).

Brgds, Torsten.

pinesol wrote:[...]
Acronis backup was useless because I was not able to boot WinXP. But R&R let me restore everyting to the date when I made the last backup.

Wasn't that your fault? With a bootable Acronis Rescue CD or StartupUp Manager the recover procedure would be a pice of cake.

Brgds, Torsten.

One of the neat things you can do with Acronis is image your internal HD to a second HD in the ultrabay (using hard disk management/clone disk) - this makes a bit-by-bit copy of the entire disk.

If the internal disk fails, you can just boot from the ultrabay disk. Or replace the internal HD with the ultrabay HD. You are then back up and running without reinstalling anything.

Incidentally, this would be a way to upgrade to a larger HD. Put the new larger in the Ultrabay, clone the internal disk to it, physically swap the drives, and you are up and running with the new drive.

Downloaded the trial version and yes it gives quite a few more options and the scheduler is way better that the one included within RR. As what I was missing in RR are the possibility of scheduling multiply backup tasks. Some files I want to make backup everyday and other only once per month, etc.

Only problem was that the within the current trial version the scheduler didn't work out that well. It couldn't open the remote archive defined to store the backuped data. Creating a manual backup point to the remote location worked fine. Issue is known and bunch of other people have the exact same problem when reading within the forum.

khaverblad wrote:Ed, how quick is it to either scan or get on with the next incrementell backup?

On my machine it takes about an hour to do a full image (around 20 GB of actual data). That's over a network to a slow file server.

R&R takes more like 3 hours. Acronis is definitely faster, and as you said gives you more options and control.

Ed Gibbs

khaverblad wrote:Ed, how quick is it to either scan or get on with the next incrementell backup?

The speed of an incremental backup depends on read speed of your hard disk(s) and compression settings.

My notes:

# Full backup of approx. 30GB on an external usb2 2,5" hard disk (4200rpm) and with high compression (CoreDuo 1.8Ghz): ~ 35-40 mins

# Incremental backup under same conditions: ~25 mins

(Remark: on my laptop I figured out that high compression (not highest) seemed to be the best balance between file size and speed. It utilizes my hard disks and both CPUs for over 90%. So far it's the fastest way doing your backups I've ever seen.

Brgds, Torsten.

Meshua are we then talking about RR or TI here and the values that you're mentioning?

khaverblad wrote:Meshua are we then talking about RR or TI here and the values that you're mentioning?

Guess! ? No, these are the values for True Image's performance since I've never used R&R.

Brgds, Torsten.

R&R also limits the number of incrementals - think it's either 3 or 5. Once you hit the limit it will combine the two oldest incrementals as the first step of a new incremental, and from my experience the process of combining the incrementals takes longer than the actual backup - 30-40 minutes is not unusual depending on how big the incrementals are.

Ed Gibbs

Hi,

I've got my new Hitachi HDD (it's a HTS421212H9AT00) with 120GB of space couple of hours ago. With this drive I finish a full backup on high compression to the new external HDD connected via USB2 in just 25 minutes (1.83GHz CoreDuo) using TrueImage. That's good enough for a daily sprint...

Brgds, Torsten.

Well, since I could get the TI Home v10 to work I downloaded the TI 9.1 Workstation edition instead and made created a schedule and created a backup point for my Thunderbird profile and mail data. All in all 1347 files and 425 directories that added up to 3.57GB of data. The backup was really fast, around 7 minutes and the archive ended up to be 2.1GB when using High Compression.

I'm used to using True Image on my older PATA equipped PCs, but haven't had much luck with my T60ws(my 1st PC with SATA). I tried an older version (7) which seems to do the backup over the network to a windows share on another PC. It took like 3+ hours to image the disk in the from-the-factory condition (maybe 10gigs of data). Experimenting with newer versions (9ws/10home) results in the backup hanging (sometimes the mouse cursor will still move, sometimes everything is frozen).

This is w/o me going into the BIOS to change the SATA compatibility setting. Is this something you must do to successfully image a SATA system? I don't run TI from inside windows, I always boot from the recovery media to do backups or restores.

insomniac59 wrote:I'm used to using True Image on my older PATA equipped PCs, but haven't had much luck with my T60ws(my 1st PC with SATA). I tried an older version (7) which seems to do the backup over the network to a windows share on another PC. It took like 3+ hours to image the disk in the from-the-factory condition (maybe 10gigs of data).

I guess the older versions of TrueImage are not fully compliant to new SATA interface. I remember that I also faced problems w/ v6 and v7 while transfering the data over a network. It was horrible slow - data drizzled thru the cable. what a pain in the [censored]. Then I got TI 8 and it has come with big improvements in the network module: DHCP really works and it's drastically faster than ever before.

Experimenting with newer versions (9ws/10home) results in the backup hanging (sometimes the mouse cursor will still move, sometimes everything is frozen).

No problems at all over here. A really quirky behaviour you're telling us.

This is w/o me going into the BIOS to change the SATA compatibility setting. Is this something you must do to successfully image a SATA system? I don't run TI from inside windows, I always boot from the recovery media to do backups or restores.

No, you might not switch from SATA to compatible mode for using TI 9 or newer. I own the 9.0 version and it works perfectly w/ my T60. Neither under Windows nor using CD caused any problems. It seems that it might be something wrong w/ your hardware configuration? Question mark. That behaviour you describe really sounds kinda unusual.

Brgds, Torsten.