Rapid Restore program

[rpwt]

Isn't anybody questioning the difficulties they are having with the R&R software? I sure wouldn't want to trust my livelihood to a package that is inherently difficult to use. I've been involved in several storage save/restore products and have the following observations:

- people usually only learn to backup their systems after they've had a catastrophe

- backups are sporadic at best; usually decreasing in frequency after the purchase of a new system/new backup program

- people actually trust their backup media! They could be religiously backing up their 60GB hard disk every day but have never tested restoringing one file. A friend of mine in a data center had been using a defective DAT drive for over a year. It wrote fine - but there was no readable data on the tape!

For my home system, I use Acronis True Image. It has good full and differential backups and is simple enough to run that *all* of us can use it.

For my work systems, I use DB transaction logs, nightly backups to local storage on the LAN, and off-line storage via the Internet (look at Connected.com and LiveVault.com).
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[beeblebrox]

I spent whole weekends with RR4.0 & Rescue Recovery v1.0 and had endless phone calls with IBM folks in Greenock about issues with rapid restore.

Not only is that software ultra-slow, but it has several fatal flaws, which led me to dump that cr.** and install some proper software, e.g. Acronis TrueImage.

The major problem is: you don't want to lose your business stuff on a laptop, when it is stolen (happened to me), or the drive suddenly dies (happened to me). So you make an additional backup on a USB drive. RRestore has that nice feature.

Everything set, and then try for test reasons to use a new laptop with a clean hard drive, use the recovery disks, start RR4.0 and...
... does not work. You can use only the original version of that data file that created the backup. a new RR4.0 has no clue about any backups, while it can read single files of the existing backup on the USB drive, it can not restore.

I had many phone calls with IBM, and they found out that it's true.
So, the software is utterly useless !!!! and gives a false sense of security. If your drive dies or gets stolen, it is very difficult to get to your data.
Therefore I now use Acronis. BTW, it is 10 times faster and has a user friendly interface.
Just my experience... and 2 cents.

[monty cantsin]

Everything set, and then try for test reasons to use a new laptop with a clean hard drive, use the recovery disks, start RR4.0 and...
... does not work. You can use only the original version of that data file that created the backup. a new RR4.0 has no clue about any backups, while it can read single files of the existing backup on the USB drive, it can not restore.

Yes, R&R has its flaws. It has failed on me one time already, so I wouldn't rely on it as the only backup solution, especially not for personal data, either. I'm also using Acronis TrueImage for such purposes. That said, I'm under the impression that IBM doesn't really advertise R&R as a powerful backup solution, but rather as a low-end, very simple emergency recovery utility for the end-user, which allows you to easily restore your system in case of a total system crash, particularly in cases when you're on the go with your notebook computer and ordinarily do not have access to any external backup media, which may be stored at your home or office. As such, it has already served me well on several occasions. Actually I never tried to restore a system backup from a USB drive, but recovering to a clean drive from a network location after booting from the R&R emergency CD worked fine for me.

gives a false sense of security.

Yes, I think I'd second that. As I prefer IBM's sub-notebook line without optical drives, I only use R&R for local backups on the computers' hard drives (no external media one has to carry around like DVDs or USB hard drives), so that I always have the chance of recovering easily and quickly from fatal errors when I am outside. As an additional security measure, however, and especially since three completely different hard drives died on me recently over the course of just a single day, I'm also always making regular backups with TrueImage to several hard drives on my network at home.

Therefore I now use Acronis. BTW, it is 10 times faster and has a user friendly interface.

While R&R is certainly not as flexible and as reliable as TrueImage, it has in my opinion a quite user friendly interface, and even some nice features that aren't included in any other imaging software that I know of yet:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... c&start=19