Wishlist!

[HDS-Stormy]

All,

We want to hear what you think! Tell us your ideas on ways to enhance Rollback. We do listen to your ideas and suggestions so feel free to let us know what you want here!

[HDS-Stormy]

I'm streamlining things so reposting this here from Baldrick!

Baldrick Baldrick is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: South Wales, UK
Posts: 81
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Hi Maxxy

Collated and Transferred from Thread "Suggestions for next cut???" (which I would suggest that you CLOSE to avoid confusion), as a little 'starter' for the OFFICIAL Wishlist Thread:

1. Add further and more flexible scheduling options. For example;

A. Allow a user defined interval that would fit between Hourly and Daily, so
that if required the user could define a snapshot every 2 or 3 or 4, etc.
hours.

B. Allow for the definition of MORE than 1 program type. Perhaps allow the
function to cater for up to 10?

2. What about some options to deal with potential MBR corruptions? Now, I
am not the sort to suggest that RB Rx would ever do such a thing but
could there not be an (i) option to save the MBr as it was before RB Rx
was installed and (ii) another one to recover/replace the MBR with the
saved version if and when there are issues?

3. Add 'Recover Files' & 'Snapshot Defragmenter' options when right clicking
the system tray icon.

- Offer a new switch under Program Settings\Program Appearance entitled
something like 'Advanced System Tray capable functions' with the option
of 'On' or 'Off'.

- If OFF the functions available when right clicking remain as they are now.

- If ON the two new fucntions suggested above in the post are added to
the list displayed, etc.

4. Further to the recent thread where the storing of snapshots over a bad
sector or the like is there any way for RB Rx to carry out checking of the
sector it is going to use and avoid using it if it is detected as being bad?

That sort of safe guard could provde very useful in terms of preventing
such events which are inveitably blamed on RB Rx...we only know about
this one due to the victim posting at this forum and I wonder how many
more may have suffered this occurrence and just written off RB Rx as a
result.

5. I believe that the interface needs an overhaul as I think that it looks
dated. The font is seriously old fashioned as are the GUI icons AND the
system tray icon.

6. From spalmer (and included because I suggested an addition to his original
idea):

- "Integration with Windows updates would be nice. The scenario I'm
envisioning would be that an auto-update is invoked and Rollback
would sense this and run a snap job prior to the update being
completed. This would give a nice restore point in the event that the
change causes problems."

To which I added that the Windows Update-related snapshot could be
made optional via a configuration setting in the Advanced settings
dialogue!

Hope that this helps?

Edit/Delete Message

[cwm9]

I'd love to see a new feature where you can choose a snapshot to be the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' of the rollback tree.

Here's how it would work. First, the management of which snapshot is the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' would be as follows:

1. You can choose to mark either an old snapshot or the working snapshot as the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'.

2. If you rollback to an old snapshot marked as the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT', you are giving the option of 'continuing the main branch' by marking the new working snapshot as the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' or leaving the old snapshot as the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'. (That is, if you continue the branch, the old snapshot is no longer the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'; instead the current working snapshot becomes the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'.)

3. If you take a snapshot while active in the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' (which can only happen if the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' is also the working snapshot), you are given the choice of leaving the new snapshot as the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT', or continuing with the current snapshot as the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'.


Now, why have a 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'?

Here's what it does:

As a background operation (or as a 'do it right now' option from the RB console), RB moves each sector in the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' from its physical redirected sector to the physical sector address equal to the virtual sector address, moving any data currently stored in that location to another unused sector if necessary.

That is, if the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' has written to virtual sector 500, and RB has redirected that write to sector 1000 because sector 500 was already in use by another snapshot (or the main snapshot, for that matter), RB will now move the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' data from physical sector 1000 (the redirected location) to physical sector 500 (the same address as the virtual sector), and move the data that was in physical sector 500 to another unused physical sector.

Once the process is complete, the WFS layout of the hard drive will exactly match the RB layout of the hard drive FOR THAT SNAPSHOT ONLY.

From then on, RB will always write to the actual sector requested by WFS (when in the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT'), moving any data it needs to as it goes.

Now you can defragment the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' (you can't defragment any of the others, of course!) and get a real honest-to-god live defragment without destroying your other snapshots, and without any other tricks.

The trade off is that every write may get turned into two writes and a read, but that only slows down writing, it doesn't slow down reading, and only slows things down if the sector requested is currently occupied which shouldn't happen often. If RB cannot track file relocate requests, you may get size inflation, but I would still be happy since my partitions are small compared to the available drive space. (My OS partition is only about 38 GB on a 1 TB drive.) Ideally, RB should hook the defrag functions and move the clusters involved instead of copying them.

Since most people have a primary snapshot they use and only go back if there is a problem, this lets you choose your working space as a defragmentable snapshot! The rest of the snapshots still work as advertised, they just can't be defragmented, which isn't any different than the way things are now.

Since older snapshots are probably related to the main snapshot in some way anyway, most of the other snapshots will get some residual defgramenting benefit. (That is, shared files will be defragmented in the other snapshots.)

If you rollback to a snapshot that is not the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT', the alternative redirection code turns off ensuring the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT' is not moved around. Thus when you go back to the 'MAIN SNAPSHOT', it is always as you left it, defragmented and ready to go.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE consider implementing this. It would make Rollback RX 100x more pleasant to use!

[nexstar]

First the short request and then the long explanation as to why .

I'd like an option to wipe (or zero) any unused sectors on the protected partition(s), please.


It has been something of a Holy Grail to be able to image a Rollback'd system and retain all of the snapshots for when (if) that image is restored. As far as I know, there are currently only two ways to do this. The first can be done within Windows using Image For Windows by Terabyte Unlimited. With the use of their Phylock utility, an image can be made of all sectors on the partition which retains the snapshots correctly. What it can't do is to image the MBR from within Windows and so this needs to be done outside of Windows with another utility in case it needs to be restored.

The second way is to use any imaging software outside of Windows which will copy all sectors. The benefit of this approach is that the MBR should also be correctly stored with the image for a successful restoration.

The problem with either of these approaches is that neither of them knows which sectors are used by RollBack and so has to fathfully copy sectors which have contained data at some point but may not now be part of any snapshot.

This makes an all sector image potentially very inefficient as that unwanted data cannot be compressed in the same way as if that sector had never been used, or had been wiped.

To give you an example, if I am re-installing a system I will often get it set up with RB installed. I will then uninstall RB and wipe the unused sectors on the disk with the freeware 'Disk Redactor'. I will then re-install RB and make an all sector image. Even though there is only the current snapshot at that point, if I restore that image then it will be restored with RB in a ready-to-go state. Also, because the disk was previously wiped, the resulting image will be a very similar size to a 'normal' image (not all sectors).

However, if I then copied an image of a DVD to the protected partition and deleted it without taking a snapshot, an all-sector image would then be anything up to 4GB larger because the previously empty sectors were now 'contaminated' by the data from the DVD.

RollBack knows exactly which secors are required and which can be wiped clean. As it seems unlikely that there is going to be an all-snapshot imaging solution from HDS in the near future, being able to clean up the disk with RB installed would seem to be quite simple to implement and would make a huge difference to those of us who like to image our snapshots as well.

.....did I say 'please'? .

Graham

[Baldrick]

I do believe that we are cookin', yeeeeeeeeeeeeha!!!!!!

[Stu]

I would humbly request that, when Rolling back to a particular snapshot, that the DOS Rollback window that appears after POST stating "Loading snapshot" states the name and comment of the snapshot. This simply gives a little piece of mind during the Rollback process. Comes in handy if you have numerous snaps and are paranoid that you inadvertently selected the wrong one to rollback to.

[Baldrick]

Originally Posted by Stu

I would humbly request that, when Rolling back to a particular snapshot, that the DOS Rollback window that appears after POST stating "Loading snapshot" states the name and comment of the snapshot. This simply gives a little piece of mind during the Rollback process. Comes in handy if you have numerous snaps and are paranoid that you inadvertently selected the wrong one to rollback to.

Hi Stu

Interesting but is there any point as by that stage you cannot cancel the rollback, only rollback again to another snapshot? And also you can tell which snpshot you rolled back to if you look at thttp://horizondatasys-forum.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gifhe Snapshot History, as it will be indicated as In Use next to a Green arrow...and indicator of where you rolled back to.

But anything to get peace of mind earlier, eh?

[mbartosik]

A huge improvement would be to be able to install onto a compressed NTFS drive. Because of this restriction I will not likely continue with evaluation.

Here's why:
Step 1:
Time to uncompress 1GB is about 20 minutes.
Time to uncompress whole disk is about 16 hours (lot of small files).
Partition will then be nearly full, and it will also need defragging.
Time to recompress once RollbackRX is installed, 16 hours.
Now the partition will certainly be fragmented.

Step 2:
So how do you advise defragging? I saw uninstall RollbackRX.
Uninstall RollbackRx, defrag. Reinstall RollbackRx -- oh no back to step 1.

Even ignoring fragmentation, 32 hours of HD trashing is too long to tolerate.

Looks like a good product, but sorry I think poor compression support is a killer for me.

[HDS-Stormy]

Originally Posted by mbartosik

A huge improvement would be to be able to install onto a compressed NTFS drive. Because of this restriction I will not likely continue with evaluation.

Here's why:
Step 1:
Time to uncompress 1GB is about 20 minutes.
Time to uncompress whole disk is about 16 hours (lot of small files).
Partition will then be nearly full, and it will also need defragging.
Time to recompress once RollbackRX is installed, 16 hours.
Now the partition will certainly be fragmented.

Step 2:
So how do you advise defragging? I saw uninstall RollbackRX.
Uninstall RollbackRx, defrag. Reinstall RollbackRx -- oh no back to step 1.

Even ignoring fragmentation, 32 hours of HD trashing is too long to tolerate.

Looks like a good product, but sorry I think poor compression support is a killer for me.

Welcome to the Horizon DataSys Forums!

Thanks for the feedback, we want to keep hearing your ideas!

[Neo]

just imagine you are running 2 windows versions, lets say Win XP and Win7, maybe after using both systems and installing a lot of stuff, windows 7 suffers from an blue screen you cant get rid of anymore and the only solution is to rollback to another snapshot. by doing that you will use all the programs you installed in win XP also, because you can either select to protect both partitions or only one of them....

being able to protect 2 or more partitions and making individual snapshots would be a huge improvement in functionality