Todo Backup 2 Advanced Beta : good points & bad points

[MerleOne]

Hi,

I just started beta-testing this new release on a Vista Home Premium SP2 Lenovo Laptop.

First impression is : wow !

Then, as I started using some features, I have noticed a few minor issues so far.

Here are the good points :
1/ No-problem installation
2/ Not a single issue so far
3/ Imaging speed onto an external HDD (Samsung 500GB) is fair (just done the full backup yet).
4/ The Win PE pre-boot environment very well done with a lot of flexibility

The not so good points (=bad points !)
1/ Reboot is necessary after installation
2/ Another Reboot when the snapshot feature is installed
3/ Overall HDD performance seems slightly degraded when snapshot is installed (longer time to boot & open a session for instance)
4/ Some messages, like when restoring a snapshot, are really ill-formulated, very unclear.
5/ I wanted to check an image, 40GB big, after I started checking the image, I got a message just 5 sec later saying it was done, but my external HDD LED was still blinking and impossible to mount the newly-image, I had an error message saying another operation was in progress, probably the check being done in background. The user should be able to stop it !
6/ I got not warning saying which partitions were protected when snapshot was active : was it the system disk only, the other partitions also ? I found out it seems to be only the system disk, but the user has to be notified !

That's most of it for now.

[MerleOne]

The second image check I performed behaved a bit differently, this time the check progressed ok, a few minutes before the end, it displayed that the image was verified ok, but it still carried on a bit. It's strange to have a message saying the check is ok before it is ended.

[willemijns]

> 1/ Reboot is necessary after installation

yes...

2/ Another Reboot when the snapshot feature is installed

i'm not sure you can avoid this

[Maverick]

Dear MerleOne,

Your options are noticed. We believe your suggestions will greatly help us improve this product. Thank you very much.

For you question, snapshot only back up your system partition.

And willemijns, thank you for the kindest assistance. And the computer need to reboot when the snapshot feature is enabled.


Sincerely,
EASEUS Support Team V
EASEUS Customer Support Center:
http://www.easeus.com/support.htm

[MerleOne]

Some stats about speed :

I performed, from Vista, a full backup then an incremental backup.

Source drive and partition : the C: (Vista Home Premium) partition of a Lenovo Laptop (3000 N200 model 0769-A), 43GB used.

Destination : external portable HDD by Samsung, 500GB.

Compression : medium (recommended setting)

No encryption

For the full backup : around 34 min
For the first incremental backup, 1 hour later, after a few changes : around 6 min.

[willemijns]

> For you question, snapshot only back up your system partition.

it can be good to give more precisions in public... what kind of changes are
on the snapshot... if i change a character on c:\foo.txt the change will be
available on the snapshot ?

[Maverick]

Dear MerleOne,

Incremental backup is surely faster than full backup, since it only backup the changes to the data against the last back up point.

And willemijns,
Snapshots are incremental points-in-time of a computer system’s state at a given moment. Todo Backup monitors all sector-level changes from the last Snapshot and writes any changes to a new Snapshot. This backup usually takes only seconds to complete. Snapshots offer the quickest way to restore a damaged Windows system to a working state.

Let us assume you created a snapshot, then you delete a letter in that foo.txt. And you restore the snapshot, you will find that letter in foo.txt is undeleted.

Sincerely,
EASEUS Support Team V
EASEUS Customer Support Center:
http://www.easeus.com/support.htm

[willemijns]

And willemijns,
Snapshots are incremental points-in-time of a computer system’s state at a given moment. Todo Backup monitors all sector-level changes from the last Snapshot and writes any changes to a new Snapshot. This backup usually takes only seconds to complete. Snapshots offer the quickest way to restore a damaged Windows system to a working state.

so it is the same as incremental backup ?

[M.Mao]

Dear willemijns,

Snapshot and incremental backup are still not the same thing. Incremental backup will just back up the data which has been changed since last backup. So there is still a difference between the two function.

If you want to know more, please refer to:

Incremental backup:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup

Snapshot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot