Casper XP

[Uncle Joe]

I've been researching various
disk imaging software products
lately and am near settling
on Casper XP version 3.
I have an 80 GB "C" and
a 60 GB "D" drive. Would
like to place an exact copy
of "C" on "D" instead of
spending hours burning CDs.
CDs are great for off-site storage
but...

Does anyone have any horror
stories about using Casper?
All the reviews read thus
far been complimentary.

I'm impressed by Casper XP's
support. Have asked questions
on Saturday and Sunday and
got replies within the hour--
even on a Sunday.

 

[Shelly F]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 13:01:44 -0400, "Uncle Joe" <Uncle

I've been researching various
disk imaging software products
lately and am near settling
on Casper XP version 3.
I have an 80 GB "C" and
a 60 GB "D" drive. Would
like to place an exact copy
of "C" on "D" instead of
spending hours burning CDs.
CDs are great for off-site storage
but...

Does anyone have any horror
stories about using Casper?
All the reviews read thus
far been complimentary.

I'm impressed by Casper XP's
support. Have asked questions
on Saturday and Sunday and
got replies within the hour--
even on a Sunday.

I have been using Casper version 3 XP for a month now. Extremely
satisfied, it took 30 minutes to create duplicate partitions on a
second hard drive, and a complete backup - all automatically.
Now it takes 4 minutes on average to do another backup, I do it twice
a week.
I went into the bios and changed the boot order to the second hard
drive, rebooted, and had an exact duplicate of my computer running in
less than 5 minutes.
Casper (Future Systems Solutions) tech support has been great as y'all
indicated, and gave me line by line instructions to backup my computer
on a Maxtor external hard drive, also.
Cost in $45 if y'all ask for a discount, or get a code from the smart
computing or other magazine ads.
I am in no way associated with the company except as a happy user.

 

[Uncle Joe]

Thanks for the input. I'm going order/install Casper XP v3
in a few minutes. I like what I've read and heard so far.
I simply want to make an exact copy of my C drive on
my D drive. Nothing fancy.

How did you "went into the bios and changed the boot order"?
I keep hearing advice about doing this, but haven't figured out
to do it on my XP Home system. Restarted in Safe Mode thinking
this would give me access to BIOS settings but it didn't.

Oh, I complained to Casper's support group about the
price going up from $44.95 (as listed in all the reviews)
to $49.99 on their web site. The support guy gave a
coupon code good for $5.00 off.

Thanks again.

 

[Rock]

Thanks for the input. I'm going order/install Casper XP v3
in a few minutes. I like what I've read and heard so far.
I simply want to make an exact copy of my C drive on
my D drive. Nothing fancy.

How did you "went into the bios and changed the boot order"?
I keep hearing advice about doing this, but haven't figured out
to do it on my XP Home system. Restarted in Safe Mode thinking
this would give me access to BIOS settings but it didn't.

Oh, I complained to Casper's support group about the
price going up from $44.95 (as listed in all the reviews)
to $49.99 on their web site. The support guy gave a
coupon code good for $5.00 off.

Thanks again.

To enter the BIOS press a key or key combination as the system boots.
What those key presses are depends on your system. Check the
documentation that came with it or see this link to see if it's listed
here: http://michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm

 

[Shelly F]

To enter the BIOS press a key or key combination as the system boots.
What those key presses are depends on your system. Check the
documentation that came with it or see this link to see if it's listed
here: http://michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm

Y'alls computer might not have the same bios and rev settings as mine,
however this is how I got into mine. Be careful when modifiying the
bios, if y'all have doubts when y'all close it - pick save without
changing rather than change and save.
Hit delete several times when booting, stop when the boot session
appears to go into the bios, blue screen.
Go to advanced bios page, change hard drive hdd-0 to hdd-1. Hard drive
0 is the first hard drive, 1 is the second.
Escape (Esc) gets y'all back to the main page.
Then save and exit if y'all are sure of what ya'll did. The computer
will then boot up to windows from the second hd.
When finished, go back and change the boot up sequence to hdd-0.
Again, if things look different than I portrayed, it is most probably
due to a different bios than I have.
If so, y'all can post the bios type here and mvp's will assist, or
follow the link from above. hth

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I simply want to make an exact copy of my C drive on
my D drive. Nothing fancy.

Be sure to not let the clone (the bootable exact copy)
see its "parent" when its started up for the 1st time. If
you do, it will form seemingly random pointers from some
of its own files to the corresponding files in the "parent"
OS, and it will forever after be dependent on the continued
presence of the "parent" to function because when you
think you're updating files in the clone, you'll really be updating
the corresponding file in the "parent".

Once the clone has started up successfully, you can shut
down and thereafter it will be OK if the clone sees its "parent"
OS when it boots up.

You can switch between the 2 OSes in a dual-boot
setup by either just reversing the HD boot order in the BIOS
to put one or the other HD at the head of the HD boot order,
or you can add an entry in the boot.ini file for the 2nd OS
and set the timeout value for your decision to 10 seconds
or so. In making an entry in boot.ini that points to the 2nd OS,
just copy the existing entry and set "rdisk(0)" to "rdisk(1)" to
indicate the 2nd HD in the boot order. You can identify which
OS is running by putting a file on the Desktop with a name
that indicates which OS it is, or you can make the background
of the Desktop different graphics.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 13:01:44 -0400, "Uncle Joe" <Uncle

I have been using Casper version 3 XP for a month now. Extremely
satisfied, it took 30 minutes to create duplicate partitions on a
second hard drive, and a complete backup - all automatically.
Now it takes 4 minutes on average to do another backup, I do it twice
a week.
I went into the bios and changed the boot order to the second hard
drive, rebooted, and had an exact duplicate of my computer running in
less than 5 minutes.
Casper (Future Systems Solutions) tech support has been great as y'all
indicated, and gave me line by line instructions to backup my computer
on a Maxtor external hard drive, also.
Cost in $45 if y'all ask for a discount, or get a code from the smart
computing or other magazine ads.
I am in no way associated with the company except as a happy user.

Just to interject, CASPER is not an imaging program so no compression. Only
creates copies, I was interested in Casper until I discovered that. I can't
see in what respect Casper is better than True Image/Ghost that will both
clone and image.

 

[Uncle Joe]

Shelly, you were lucky. My first backup
took 2 hours and 45 minutes in Safe
Mode to copy 32 GBs of data. AM
using two 7200 RPM IDE drives, XP
Home, 1.6 GHz P4 CPU, and 1 GB of
RAM. Wasn't too pleased about
that. It was simple to set up and run,
though.

Don't know how to make it run
faster on my system. Gave it
all the resources I had.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

[.....] CASPER is not an imaging program so no compression. Only
creates copies, I was interested in Casper until I discovered that. I can't
see in what respect Casper is better than True Image/Ghost that will both
clone and image.

Casper specializes in cloning, and it can clone a single partition
to another HD that already has other partitions on it. True Image
cannot do that. True Image will only copy an *entire* HD to
another *entire* HD. This great for migrating to a larger HD, but
it is limiting if you have more than one partition on the source HD
and you only want to clone one of them, and/or you already have
other partitions on the destination HD and you want to keep them.
Ghost can copy a single partition to a HD that already has other
partitions, but it is more expensive and it requires Microsoft's
.NET Framework to be installed and it requires going in and out
of Windows. Casper XP doesn't require .NET Framework and
you stay in Windows.

The ability to clone a single partition to a destination HD that
contains other partitions is exactly what you want if you have,
say an OS partition and a data partition on HD 1, and you
want to save a clone of the OS partition as a snapshot of the
OS at a specified point in time on a large archive HD 2 that has
other clones on it, each of which correspond to previous points
in time. I do this on a weekly basis, and I have clones going
back 6 weeks at all times. And unlike with imaging, each of
those clones can be immediately booted without having to
first "restore" an image to a free HD - a process which could
involve reversing the compression and transferring an entire
partition back to a HD. The ability to revert back to a clone can
be a God-send if your OS drive just fails in the midst of doing
day-trading, for instance. Or maybe your business presentation
is due in 2 hours and your OS gets corrupted. Or maybe you
want to do multi-booting with several versions of the same OS,
each version having different incompatible software installed,
so you make 5 clones on a large HD and then install the various
software on each of them. The more you get into cloning, the
more you can imagine doing with clones. And Casper XP can
make them better and with more ease than the other utilities.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Uncle Joe]

Actually, Edward, I wanted a utility that would
make an exact copy of my C drive files. Am not
interested in adding additional compression to
my disks. Many of my C drive folders/files
are already compressed with WinZip.

Didn't want to add Ghost because (1) its cost,
and (2) didn't want to add another Symantec
product to my inventory. Already have
Symantec Internet Security 2005 and its a
serious resource hog. Had planned from
the start to run it, like most of my other
utilities, in Safe Mode. Don't know if
Ghost would work in Safe Mode since it
depends on the .Net framework.

Don't know anything about True Image. Kept
hearing glowing reports about Casper XP so
decided to go that way.

 

[Uncle Joe]

Thanks, Rock, for the link. My mobo is an
ASUS P4B266C. Linked to ASUS but
its "download" servers are down for
synchronization.

I'll download the ASUS mobo manual
when I get the chance. Pressing Del did
nothing, and pressing Pause, welll, it
stopped my system--forcing me to power
off the system to escape. My mobo
obviously uses a different key to enter
BIOS. Can't find my P4B266C manual.

Did learn one thing from the ASUS site.
Can't run a faster CPU than P4 2.4 GHz.
That means this time next year, I'll be
running a new mobo and CPU.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

[.....] CASPER is not an imaging program so no compression. Only
creates copies, I was interested in Casper until I discovered that. I can't
see in what respect Casper is better than True Image/Ghost that will both
clone and image.

Casper specializes in cloning, and it can clone a single partition
to another HD that already has other partitions on it. True Image
cannot do that. True Image will only copy an *entire* HD to
another *entire* HD. This great for migrating to a larger HD, but
it is limiting if you have more than one partition on the source HD
and you only want to clone one of them, and/or you already have
other partitions on the destination HD and you want to keep them.
Ghost can copy a single partition to a HD that already has other
partitions, but it is more expensive and it requires Microsoft's
.NET Framework to be installed and it requires going in and out
of Windows. Casper XP doesn't require .NET Framework and
you stay in Windows.

The ability to clone a single partition to a destination HD that
contains other partitions is exactly what you want if you have,
say an OS partition and a data partition on HD 1, and you
want to save a clone of the OS partition as a snapshot of the
OS at a specified point in time on a large archive HD 2 that has
other clones on it, each of which correspond to previous points
in time. I do this on a weekly basis, and I have clones going
back 6 weeks at all times. And unlike with imaging, each of
those clones can be immediately booted without having to
first "restore" an image to a free HD - a process which could
involve reversing the compression and transferring an entire
partition back to a HD. The ability to revert back to a clone can
be a God-send if your OS drive just fails in the midst of doing
day-trading, for instance. Or maybe your business presentation
is due in 2 hours and your OS gets corrupted. Or maybe you
want to do multi-booting with several versions of the same OS,
each version having different incompatible software installed,
so you make 5 clones on a large HD and then install the various
software on each of them. The more you get into cloning, the
more you can imagine doing with clones. And Casper XP can
make them better and with more ease than the other utilities.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Uncle Joe]

Ran my first Casper XP backup last night
and checked the results in detail this
morning. Was surprised at the result.
Both the C and D drives are 7200 RPM
EIDE units formatted as NTFS.

MS Explorer Properties stats on the C
drive revealed that it has 20.6 GB of used
space out of 80 GB.

The D drive (completely reformatted
prior to the backup run) shows that it has
16.6 GB of used space out 60 GB total
space.

If Casper XP makes an exact copy of the
C drive onto the D drive, where is the
missing 4 GBs of data? I would think
that the D drive would be showing 20.6
GBs of used space, too.

Casper's support team was wonderful in
responding to my pre-sales questions
in an hour or two over the weekends.
They have yet to respond to my question
this AM about the missing 4 GBs of data
that should be on my D drive.

I'm feeling a wee bit uncomfortable about
relying on Casper XP in the future. Don't
know how to begin to isolate the missing
data on the D drive.

 

[Shelly F]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 02:35:04 -0400, "Uncle Joe" <Uncle

Shelly, you were lucky. My first backup
took 2 hours and 45 minutes in Safe
Mode to copy 32 GBs of data. AM
using two 7200 RPM IDE drives, XP
Home, 1.6 GHz P4 CPU, and 1 GB of
RAM. Wasn't too pleased about
that. It was simple to set up and run,
though.

Don't know how to make it run
faster on my system. Gave it
all the resources I had.

I cloned a Maxtor 60gb with 25GB of data to a 60GB similar Maxtor in
the 30 minutes I mentioned.
In any case, the subsequent backups take just minutes, but of course
it depends upon how much data is changed from backup to backup. In my
case, 4-5 minutes is norm so far.
I did do a full backup to my Maxtor USB 120GB external hard drive
(allocated just 60GB, left the rest for other files) - as I remember,
it did take about an hour. Again, subsequent backups are much faster.

 

[Shelly F]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:24:27 -0400, "Uncle Joe" <Uncle

Ran my first Casper XP backup last night
and checked the results in detail this
morning. Was surprised at the result.
Both the C and D drives are 7200 RPM
EIDE units formatted as NTFS.

MS Explorer Properties stats on the C
drive revealed that it has 20.6 GB of used
space out of 80 GB.

The D drive (completely reformatted
prior to the backup run) shows that it has
16.6 GB of used space out 60 GB total
space.

If Casper XP makes an exact copy of the
C drive onto the D drive, where is the
missing 4 GBs of data? I would think
that the D drive would be showing 20.6
GBs of used space, too.

Casper's support team was wonderful in
responding to my pre-sales questions
in an hour or two over the weekends.
They have yet to respond to my question
this AM about the missing 4 GBs of data
that should be on my D drive.

I'm feeling a wee bit uncomfortable about
relying on Casper XP in the future. Don't
know how to begin to isolate the missing
data on the D drive.

Might want to wait for Casper folks to respond, but it might be due to
data similar to GoBack data which is not cloned. Some files are
'locked', not copied nor necessary by backup programs such as
Retrospect, also.
The first time that I cloned my hard drive I checked about half of the
programs, a third of the games, and all of the 'critical' files to
insure a valid backup. It was time consuming, I did not find any
discrepancies; I have enough confidence now to just let the program do
its thing.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Casper XP doesn't copy over a number of
system files, such as the contents of the
paging file and various cache files. I've
seen a list of these files that was in a posting
within the past 30 days. I'm sure that if you
run your clone for a while, that you'll see that
nothing is missing. Remember to not let the
clone see its "parent" when you run it for the
first time, though.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Rock]

Thanks, Rock, for the link. My mobo is an
ASUS P4B266C. Linked to ASUS but
its "download" servers are down for
synchronization.

I'll download the ASUS mobo manual
when I get the chance. Pressing Del did
nothing, and pressing Pause, welll, it
stopped my system--forcing me to power
off the system to escape. My mobo
obviously uses a different key to enter
BIOS. Can't find my P4B266C manual.

Did learn one thing from the ASUS site.
Can't run a faster CPU than P4 2.4 GHz.
That means this time next year, I'll be
running a new mobo and CPU.

You're welcome. Good luck.

 

[Uncle Joe]

Excuse me for being dense, Tim, but what
do you mean by "Remember to not let the
clone see its "parent" when you run it for the
first time, though." My drives sit atop
each other in the case, and they show
next to each other in MS Explorer. I
haven't intentionally allowed the D drive
to see the C drive, but it's possible that
anything could happen--considering that
the D drive is a sneaky little bastard.

I was hoping for an exact one-for-one
folder/file backup so that if anything were
to happen to my C drive, I could recover
using the D drive. Skipping files make
me nervous. What if Future Whatever
were to inadvertently skip a few
critical files? We'd be up the creek.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Here is a posting by "Eddie" on Sept 18 in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment:
----------------------------------------------------------

I emailed Casper XP support and within an hour I got a response
which satisfied my curiousity about the missing 'used' space. The
following I quote the Casper XP technical support person's email
to me:

--------------------------------start quote-----------------------
A difference in expected space utilization (and also file and folder
counts) can be caused by a number of things, including the Windows
swap file, hibernation file, other temporary and instance specific files,
or even the cluster size or file system format of the source and
destination.


As an optimization, Casper XP actually excludes the Windows swap
file and hibernation file when cloning a drive on which Windows is
running. The swap file is a temporary file used by Windows to manage
virtual memory and is created on demand when needed. Likewise, the
hibernation file is also a temporary file used by Windows to hibernate
the computer and is created on demand when needed. Depending on
the amount of RAM installed in the computer, both of these files can be
extremely large. The size of a hibernation file is typically equal to the
amount of RAM installed. The size of a swap file is typically much greater
than the amount of RAM installed (3 or 4 times the size is not atypical).


In addition, Casper XP will exclude the GoBack history file when GoBack
is in use, as well as certain files within the System Volume Information
folder when necessary. Primarily these files represent system restore
points specific to the original disk configuration which should not be
included. (Sometimes, these can represent a considerable amount of
space.)


Other observable differences may include possibly new or changed
files in the logged-in user Temp folder and Windows temp folder.
Depending on your system setup, services and utilities running under
Windows may be changing, creating, and removing temporary or
state files so it may be impossible to find an exact byte utilization
match on an active system drive -- i.e. it's a moving target in that
respect. When cloning a drive, Casper XP actually begins by taking
a snapshot or "picture" of the drive and then clones the snapshot.
This ensures a stable, point-in-time image of the drive is cloned.
(The newest version of Ghost, another popular drive imaging solution,
recently introduced a similar capability that they call “hot imaging”.)


If Casper XP has any trouble during the cloning process, it will log the
problem as well as any affected files and/or directories in the Exceptions
section of the Activity Report that is generated at the completion of the
cloning process. Casper XP will also alert you to these exceptions in the
Finish step of the Copy Drive wizard.
-----------------------------------------end quote-----------------------

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Do a search in Groups.Google.com for any
posting in 2005 by me in:
microsoft.public.windowsxp.*
with the words "parent clone 1st startup"
and you'll get about a dozen explanations of this.

The easiest way to do this (and understand
what you're doing) is to simply disconnect
the source HD (the one containing the
"parent" OS) from the system when you start
up the clone OS for the first time. You don't
have to adjust jumpers or the clone's HD
position on the cable to do this because the
BIOS will automatically move the 2nd HD
to the head of the HD boot order, and it will
then go to the clone HD for the boot files
when starting up.

Please note that this does NOT prohibit one
from starting up the "parent" OS with the clone
OS visible to *it* before the clone has been
run for the 1st time. What is important is that
the *clone* does not see its "parent" when the
*clone* runs for the 1st time.

*TimDaniels*