Go Back for Win XP/Home

[curious]

Morning -

Have used Roxio's GoBack on Win 98 and am very impressed with it. We now have a XP and am interested in reactions to Norton's GoBack.

And, any other suggestions for a similar product for XP.

Thank you all,
Curious

[viking33]

Hi Curious,
I used GoBack for quite some time with 98 and early XP. While it always seemed to do it's job well and it saved me a few times, it DID sometimes get in the way of some programs and it was required to disable GB in order to install some. I dont recall the particulars about this but it got annoying at times to disable it and there went all of the past data in GB. Some also say that it slowed down your system some.

I presently use Acronis True Image as do a number of other loungers. It creates an entire image of your selected drives and you can restore them to the date you last made an image. The timeliness of your images of course determines what point you can restore your data. If you neglect to Image for some time then your restores are not quite up to date. That all depends on you and how often you create images.

BTW, the latest issue of GoBack is now from Symantec who bought out the Roxio product.

[JohnGray]

Surely the built-in System Restore XP feature is an adequate replacement for GoBack? Or do I misunderstand what each does?

I have GoBack on a Gateway PC running Windows 98 SE, but fortunately I have never, ever, needed to use it! Similarly for System Restore on XP Pro, touch wood...

John

[viking33]

John.
------------------------------
Or do I misunderstand what each does?
-----------------------------

System Restore does as the name suggests, restore SYSTEM files to an earlier time.
GoBack will restore ALL files to an earlier time. ( warts and all ) It needs a minimum of 4 gigs to restore a FAT32 drive. (according to the specs )
True Image or Disk Image will image EVERYTHING on a drive to an Image file.
A big difference is that GB will sit doing it's thing in the background, like System Restore.
TI or DI will create images on your schedule and will not take up system resourses like the others will do.

[JohnGray]

I see - I would have never considered GoBack to be a backup for user files! I would have thought that, for recoverability, user files should be backed up somewhere other than on the system hard disk!

John

[DocWatson]

John,

Some time ago, here in the Lounge, SMBP posted a response to one of my posts about GoBack being useless after I had a hard drive failure, to inform me that there were issues with GoBack and the master boot record. It seems there is some evidence that GoBack rewrites the MBR and that this can cause hard drive failures. The symptoms he posted were almost identical to mine and it was enough for me to stop using GoBack and remove it from my system. It does , however, do an excellent job and restores an entire hard drive to it's previous state (pre-virus, pre-malware, pre-anything !!! But if the drive fails, it's useless !!!

[DocWatson]

My personal choice for backup and recovery these days is True Image from Acronis. Like GoBack, it creates an exact image of your hard drive. Unlike GoBack, it's not real-time, running in the background. You have to manually create the images, either full images or incremental additoins to an existing image. While more tedious, it allows for external media backups, which are inherently safer and more secure.

[curious]

Evening, Doc

I am about to download a trial version of True Image.

I had to return GoBack because, I was told by Dell, there were conflicts with Win XP's Restore system and GoBack, I was wondering if there were any hidden, or overt, gottchas with True Image. I do not want to go thru the returning hassle again.

Are there any known conflicts with Win XP. Nothing that I could find doing a search but, then again, I didn't find anything about the conflict between GoBack and Win XP.

Thanks much.

Curious

[viking33]

Curious,
-----------------------
Are there any known conflicts with Win XP
----------------------
There are none that I know of and I have been using it through a number Versions 6,7,8.
I know that Doc and a number of other Loungers use TI and I don't remember any serious problems mentioned at all.
You can do a search on True Image here in the lounge to see what comments have been made about this outstanding program.

[charlotte]

I use TI with WinXP Pro and have had no problems at all with it.

[curious]

Thank you, and Bob, very much. I really appreciate the input.

Curious

[DocWatson]

Hi Curious,

You caught me at a good time to ask about True Image. I just used it about two weeks ago to create an image of my system before I upgraded my Norton AV from 2003 to 2005 and due to a couple of very badly written programs from Symantec (Norton AV 2003 & 2005) not working and playing well together or alone (if you ask them to install or uninstall themselves) I had to revert to my TrueImage backup and restore my C drive to get back to square one and clean up the mess created by these two programs before it got started. Got my system back with no hint of any problem ever having existed (sounds familiar to a GoBack user I know). I've been using TrueImage for almost two years with XP Pro SP 1 & 2 and have never had any problems creating or restoring images or files and folders from an image. I've had one situation where my profile became corrupt and I had to boot from a TrueImage rescue CD and restore my full backup image from an external USB drive and this instance where I restored only my C partition using TrueImage from Windows to get out of a bad installation. I've had no problems with or conflicts between XP and TrueImage and until something better comes along, I wouldn't be without a TrueImage backup image of my drive. <img src=/S/thumbup.gif border=0 alt=thumbup width=15 height=15>

[bigaldoc]

Re: the endorsements of Bob, Charlotte and Doc:

From way back in the corner came a reply: Amen!

[bleduc]

Double Ditto from this Bob!

[curious]

Again, my thanks to all who responded!

I've downloaded the trial version but for the life of time I don't know how to proceed. I downloaded the User Guide but I don't know which choices to Select (Fat32, etc.) I've searched for a Tutorial for True Image, but couldn't find one. Can someone direct me to a site which is a How To. I've also searched for books, to no avail.
I found GoBack much more intuitive than TI, even tho their site says it's easy. Probably is, for others.

As an aside, and this may be a coincidence, but today (I downloaded it yesterday) when I booted I got "Generic Host Process for win32 Services encountered a problem and needed to close. I cicked on More Info and get

szappname: svchost.exe sczappver: 0.0.0.0 szmodname: unknown
szmodver: 0.0.0.0 offset: 00000000.

In Error report contents:
Two lines
COCUME~1NANCY~1LOCALS~1TempWER dff.dir.dor 00svchost.exe.mdmp
The 2nd line is the same except for the ending, which is appcompat.txt

The computer runs ok, but this is the 2nd time I've received this message. I THINK the first time was after I ran GoBack (since uninstalled). A coincidence??

Thank you very much.
Curious