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Last post Author Topic: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?  (Read 57862 times)

Simon(Altaro)

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #75 on: October 19, 2010, 05:10 AM »
Hi Armando,

I am one of the developers of Oops!Backup and I wanted to give you some more information regarding the RAM requirements.  We have performed many tests to ensure that Oops!Backup is not using extra RAM.  Keep in mind that there is always a balance between better performance and low system requirements.

RAM Requirements

Normally you should be seeing this RAM Usage:

Oops!Backup Manager - around 50 MB of RAM
Oops!Backup Engine - around 23 MB of RAM
Oops!Backup VSS Service - around 10 MB of RAM.

We have noticed though that on Windows 7 systems with a large amount of RAM (3GB +) Oops!Backup uses more RAM.  Compared to a Windows 7 machines with 1GB RAM we see that the 3GB system can use up to twice as much RAM.  We have tested this with Performance Monitor and noticed that in Windows 7 when the system is running out of RAM then then Oops!Backup suddenly uses less RAM.  Also after leaving the system idle for a long period of time (0.5 - 1 hours) in Windows 7 Oops!Backup suddenly starts using much less RAM.  For example we see the Manager going down to 5/10 MB of RAM.  As soon as the UI of Oops!Backup is used then this jumps backup to 25MB and then to 50MB as the manager and backintime screens are loaded.

Also after a backup using ReverseDelta for large files (eg. PST) then you may see the Engine shoot up to 100MB of RAM.  This will only occur if the system has available RAM and will eventually be release once the backup has been completed.  This may not be release immediately but will be released when needed.

The point that I am trying to make is that we are sure that there are no Memory Leaks / Excessive RAM usage.  The more RAM available on a windows 7 machine the more RAM that is used.  When RAM is required for other applications then Oops!Backup will use less.

That being said we are always trying to reduce the resources that we use without effecting performance :)  In fact you can see that we managed to keep the CPU usage as low as possible.

Restore Issue

I also wanted to make a quick not regarding the restore issue that you had.  Oops!Backup will never overwrite the original file when restoring unless you enable the "Overwrite" checkbox manually.  It also allows for a Full Preview which restores the file to a temporary folder and opens it for you to check whether it is the correct version.  Finally if you set your backup frequency to every 5 minutes the previous version will never be older than 5 minutes as long as you keep on saving the file.

VSS Issue

Finally please note that VSS allows for the backup of locked and open files, but the file still needs to be saved before Oops!Backup can back it up.  Therefore if you are working on a word document Oops!Backup will backup the document while it is open but will only backup the last saved version of the file.  Therefore CTRL-S remains very important :)

I hope this helps and that you will continue to use Oops!Backup.

Thanks,
Simon (Altaro Software)

Armando

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #76 on: October 19, 2010, 08:11 AM »
Hi Simon,

Thanks a lot for taking the time to address these issues here.
You might be "right on all points" but, I'm not entirely convinced though.

If you re-read my (long) posts carefully, you'll see your explanations aren't completely following my argumentation and some important details are missing.

I'll try to keep it short.

RAM

First, I do understand these RAM things. Maybe not as an assembly programmer, but I dot get the general idea. I've read/heard the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" thousands of times, I do get it (even if I haven't always found it true in terms of performance -- more flushing, more disc I/O, more paging... but who am I to find that an app consumes a lot of RAM, right ?). I find that because of that maxim all apps now miraculously use just the right amount of RAM, no more, no less, as long as there are no leaks.  :)

Second, I've never seen the RAM figures you talk about. Even at mere start up and when it's hidden in the sys. tray. BUT, yes I've got 3GB installed, but win XP, not Vista, not Windows 7. [Anybody can look at my screenshot on the altaro forum]

Third, RAM usage always stayed relatively high even when I overloaded my system with other active processes (for testing purposes). Didn't see Oops!Backup release it, ever. However, it's possible that it eventually would, and I welcome any user here to post a screenshot with their RAM more than maxed out and Oops having released it for some other apps to benefit.


Fourth, I really don't mind if RAM fluctuates, it's a fact of life, so I didn't complain about that. Only about average RAM usage.


Restore Issue

Yes, as I said to Julian, I now understand all that. I said here that I was stupid, that it was mostly my fault, etc. (readers can witness), but that wasn't the only problem. It was also a date discrepancy problem. See VSS matters etc. and please see my screenshot at the altaro Forum.

VSS Issue

Thanks for the info, but if you reread what I wrote, you'll see that I understand that, and there.s 99% chance that the problem wasn't that I didn't save my code. The problem is most probably that the VSS malfunctioned, so file wasn't backed-up. There was a quick message about VSS malfunction at some point during the night. The problem is that the restore window didn't reflect that. The last backup that worked for in use files was there, sure, but nothing on the file didn't reflected the fact that one or two were skipped. The date from the tab indicated that files were last backed up at such time "today" when the file was last backed up "Yesterday".

Don't worry, I'd happily admit that I didn't save my stuff at all, and that's why it happened. But, you don't have to believe it, but I'm a compulsive ctrl-s person. If I look at the AutoVer folders right now, I see that I saved my project probably about once every 5 min in the last few days. That's a a good average IMO. I even press ctrl-s when I don't need to sometimes, and unwanted stuff happens (like in Firefox when I write a message... nope, don't want to save the web page!).

And then there are the other issues : Hard Drive filling up incredibly rapidly (backup every 5 min would be absolutely unthinkable here... I mean, in the same day, MB went up very fast). Maybe for some special folders.... this is linked to the full file backup duplication issue.

I won't go through the whole thing again to not annoy anybody. Oops is good. But if you look at my other posts here you'll also see that there are a few features that I'd like to have (like storing versions on some archiving media)
« Last Edit: October 19, 2010, 08:13 AM by Armando »

Armando

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #77 on: October 19, 2010, 08:21 AM »
(BTW, when I'll have more time (which is not this week) I could try to re-create all the problems I mentioned... if you want. Especially the VSS problem/missing files + RAM usage, etc. I could screencast some and send them to your team.)

Simon(Altaro)

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #78 on: October 19, 2010, 08:37 AM »
Hi Armando,

Thanks again for your help on this.  It's strange that Oops!Backup is taking up so much RAM for you even on simple start-up.  I have just checked on my system which is Windows 7 with 4GB RAM and you can see much lower RAM usage in the attached screenshot.  I agree with your points about the RAM fluctuating etc. I wish we could figure out why your RAM requirements are higher from startup.

Capture2.PNG

Regarding the date discrepancy if a few files are skipped due to being locked then Oops!Backup still considers that as a successful backup.  Therefore the timestamp will still show up in the backintime browser.  There is a way to protect against this:

From the Advanced Settings in the Manager window -
- Enable VSS
- Disable "Backup anyway if VSS fails".

This way you would have been given a backup failure message instead of a warning.

Again I hope this helps :)  And thanks once again for all your help.

Thanks,
Simon

Simon(Altaro)

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #79 on: October 19, 2010, 08:44 AM »
Hi Armando,

Just saw your second post now... Thanks for the offer.  It would be best to contact us on our support email or forum.

Thanks,
Simon

MerleOne

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #80 on: October 19, 2010, 08:51 AM »
Hi,
I have another remark about Oops!Backup.  So far I used it on folders having relatively small files, so I didn't notice.  Then, recently, I started to include a folder that containes my (big) outlook .pst files.  When a new backup is performed and when a .pst has been changed, OB first seems to backup the whole .pst, then perform the reverse delta operation.  Since I have a lot of .pst, it really take ages.  Even if the storage is efficient after the backup is done, it would be great if OB could only save the content of the reverse delta data, then create the last version file on the destination and not the other way around.  It would be time efficient, as well as space efficient.
.merle1.

Simon(Altaro)

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #81 on: October 19, 2010, 09:27 AM »
Hi MerleOne, yes you are right..

Unfortunately for a backup destination to receive the delta file with changes and then rebuild the original file, it needs to be an "intelligent" backend, which a USB drive or network share is not.
We will be working on this type of functionality (ie. a backend receiver application) in the future though.

Thanks
Simon

MerleOne

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #82 on: October 19, 2010, 09:39 AM »
Thanks for your reply !
.merle1.

Armando

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #83 on: October 19, 2010, 10:28 AM »
Thanks Simon.

I'll just comment on this :

Regarding the date discrepancy if a few files are skipped due to being locked then Oops!Backup still considers that as a successful backup.  Therefore the timestamp will still show up in the backintime browser.  There is a way to protect against this:

From the Advanced Settings in the Manager window -
- Enable VSS
- Disable "Backup anyway if VSS fails".

Ah ! this is it. And so I guess that the wrong file wouldn't have been there if this option had been unchecked ?

In any case, as I suggested in the Altaro forum, I think that if, for some reasons, the file wasn't backed up or badly backed up , etc., I think that there should be some UI warning at restore informing the user... A popup, a Color code, ...  "not all files restored were properly backed up last time, and you should review those : File list ". Or something along these lines.


Thanks

Simon(Altaro)

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #84 on: October 19, 2010, 10:36 AM »
Hi Armando,

Yes exactly - disabling that option would have prevented the problem. 

I really like your suggestion and I will definitely add it to our development wish list.

Thanks,
Simon

J-Mac

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #85 on: October 19, 2010, 12:21 PM »
Simon,

I'd like to welcome you to DonationCoder.com and to thank you for stopping by and helping users to understand Oops Backup, as well as taking back suggestions. It is great to have you here!

Thanks again!

Jim

J-Mac

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #86 on: October 19, 2010, 12:26 PM »
I should mention that I recently purchased three licenses for Oops Backup and installed the first license on my daughter's computer running Vista Home Premium on Saturday. She is thrilled so far as she has never stored much data on her computer before but recently found herself thinking about the many backup lectures with which I have hammered her! Fortunately she shouldn’t experience some of the problems that Armando did - the total size of her user directory that I set up Oops to backup is 29 GB, and I connected a 1TB USB 2.0 drive for her backup store. I think it would be tough for anything to fill that up quickly!

Thanks!

Jim

Simon(Altaro)

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #87 on: October 20, 2010, 11:57 AM »
Hi Jim,

Thanks! I'm happy to help.

Also I wanted to point out that if you are concerned about filling up a backup drive you can easily choose how many versions to keep from the Advanced Settings.  You can have old versions deleted automatically based upon these two options:

Option a:  Only keep old versions for a period of time (eg.  Delete versions after 1 month, 6 months, 2 years etc.)
Option b:  Set a size quota for the folder that is used to store previous versions.  (eg.  Only store 20GB of old versions)

Thanks,
Simon

Curt

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #88 on: December 28, 2010, 11:26 AM »
... a 30% Discount on both of our products ? Altaro Oops!Backup ($11 in savings) & Altaro Backup FS ($29 in savings).

The Promo Code is: LOYALTY2010

Special Link to buy Altaro Oops!Backup with 30% Discount:
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Feel free to use the promotion code yourself or to send it to your family and friends.


For those of you that have a small company or work at a company that you think backup is needed then we have another exciting offer.

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Please note that these promotion codes expire on 31 December 2010.

As always, if you have any queries feel free to contact our support department on [email protected].
Best regards,
Sam Perry [email protected]
Customer Service
Altaro Software - www.altaro.com

tomos

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #89 on: February 03, 2011, 05:21 AM »
Can anyone tell me if the language can be changed within Oops? (I need German)
I presume it can, but I want to get it for someone else so I want to be sure (& the site doesnt mention other languages that I can see)

BTW, it's on offer at the moment along with Easus data recovery for 15$

There's a new mini-bundle out now guys: http://bundlelytic.com/fire-sale/
Tom

Curt

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #90 on: February 03, 2011, 07:06 AM »
-sorry, but the version from today's firesale comes in English only - and I don't think we can have any other version. By mistake the bundlelytic version even comes without a license key. I am waiting for MakeUseOf Support to react.

-------
5 minutes later: license key received
« Last Edit: February 03, 2011, 07:11 AM by Curt »

J-Mac

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #91 on: February 03, 2011, 11:31 AM »
I purchased three licenses the last time Oops had a sale, and I am struggling with it currently. I opened a support ticket yesterday with Altaro. First, once this thing starts backing up there is no way to stop or pause it. Oops can get a little high in CPU usage at times, like any backup program. But if it is taking a little longer than expected and I want to work on something that requires no "stealing" of resources, like DVD authoring or editing, I can't stop Oops; I have to wait until it gives me the time. I don’t like that!

Also it has difficulties - big difficulties - deleting old backups. My backup storage grew a little too big too fast for my liking so I wanted to reduce its size. If you delete the oldest backups from within Oops it slows to a crawl. E.g., deleting less than a week's worth of backups Oops took over 20 minutes just to select the old backups! Then a couple hours - running at 75 to 85% CPU trying to delete them. It was unresponsive for so long I finally gave up and killed the process - and the service, too - and then just went into DOpus and manually deleted the files and folders. Manually. Took all of < 1 minute.

Then last night I noticed that the Oops storage area had increased by an additional 145 GB! I found a folder named "Recovered Files" in the Oops Profile folder. Why? I don’t know yet. I deleted that too.

It just doesn’t act like most other backup programs I have used, and it doesn’t allow you to freely change, delete, pause, etc.; all features that Altaro really needs to implement in order to make it a usable product IMO. I'm awaiting the next reply from support to see what I do from here.

Thank you.

Jim

tomos

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #92 on: February 03, 2011, 12:34 PM »
I purchased three licenses the last time Oops had a sale, and I am struggling with it currently.

hmmm, I was hoping to buy something easy to use (not for me) but that doesnt sound overly promising
Tom

J-Mac

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #93 on: February 03, 2011, 12:37 PM »
Tom, it is very easy to install and start it backing up. It's backup simplified. Problem is in trying to control it at all. I can't tell if they designed it this way so that people can't control/configure it, or if they just haven't developed the program enough.

Jim

SKA

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #94 on: February 03, 2011, 11:21 PM »
Jim
Do you know where they show what is the  latest version info on their website ?
I searched and searched but no dice.

SKA

J-Mac

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #95 on: February 04, 2011, 12:00 AM »
Not sure - I'd have to check, but the last time I checked a few days ago it said 3.0.8.0, yet Support told me in an email yesterday to download 3.0.18 - which doesn’t sound right. Unless they are using a numbering system like 3.0.1, 3.0.2, etc. up to 3.0.18, 3.0.19...  Of course that would mean that I somehow missed 3.0.9 through 3.0.17 all in a couple of days. I don’t think so. Weird.

Thanks!

Jim

george7987

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #96 on: May 11, 2011, 08:01 AM »
Very interesting reading, especially J-MAC and where he got to after 3 weeks of using the product (been there)....

When V2 was under rampant development, I got involved and was a big fan, had lots of issues though and hoped they'd all be resolved in V3, but that didn't happen, V3 was more of a service pack, and at 3.0.31 that still seems to be the state of play.

The fundamental underlying concept behind Oops, i.e. the deltas and the easy access to the latest version via windows explorer, is great, but I finally had the same problem as J-MAC, couldn't for the life of me workout what it was putting into the repository, nor how to prune/clean it after changes to the backup specifications.

While everyone says the BackInTime interface is simple, I personally would like to throttle the person who designed it. There is no menu system scoping out and giving access to the complete functionality of the product, additions have been tacked on via little screens, buttons, context menus....you find yourself right mouse clicking all over the product trying to find functionality......there is no easy to review list of all available past versions, those bloody dated green animated slides representing timelines, you open one and the others close, what is wrong with a standard scrolling list for gods sake??

<<ed>> And it does not highlight files that previously existed and have been deleted, this one really annoys me. It highlights files/folders I have told it not to backup in exceptions, but not those that have some past history in the rep[ository, but have been deleted!! <<end ed>>

Having said all that however, I did put it back on recently, because of its 'transactional' approach to a backup, where if a backup fails, it is roilled back and done again, along with the recent additions allowing limitation to the size of history. I did this after a power failure in the middle of a SyncToy job left a backup drive corrupted. (Whether Oops will actually improve this scenario or not, have no real idea, I just find the whole product the most impossible to evaluate that I have ever had to)

Yes as they say, it is simple to install and start....if you don't ask too many questions....but who of you are going to trust your future data recovery requirements to blind faith in a product you don't fully understand, and I still fail to fully understand Oops after all this.

I've already had one issue with the second drive synchronization, and was only able to solve that by choosing to delete all versions of the files involved, but on looking in the repository, saw that it had only deleted the latest and the history was still there??? not what I expected and this takes me back to the comment about problems pruning/cleaning the repository. <<ed>> I may have worked this out. On the delete, I think that what it has done is copy the Latest to be deleted to History, so it has treated it as a deleted file, thus allowing me to go back to a date prior to my removing all versions, and still recover a version prior to this date. This would be appropriate if I actually deleted the file, but since I chose to delete ALL versions from the backup, it should in this case have deleted the history as well. This is my problem with Oops, we spend half our lives trying to work out what it is doing because the documentation is so poor and scant <<end ed>> This history seems to have become old versions now that a new backup has happened, but who knows if they are recoverable because I thought the most recent delta was created by comparing the changed file with the latest version (which I just deleted) and the latest delta in history would have related to the latest I deleted rather than the changed file?????

A major problem I have with Oops is the scant to negligable documentation on the product especially with regards to micro detail on what goes on within the repositiory of backup versions, i.e when versions and deltas are created and deleted and how I can manipulate that according to my requirements because only knowledge of that will give me full understanding of just what goes on within Oops.

I'd love for Oops to succeed as a backup product because of it's fundamental concepts outlined above, but for me, I am still parallel running Synctoy with Oops, and important files are being backed up online with IDrive, because I just can't develop trust in any of them.
« Last Edit: May 11, 2011, 06:55 PM by george7987 »

mouser

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #97 on: May 21, 2011, 12:02 AM »
I've finally gotten myself a NAS and am looking for an automatic versioning backup system that will monitor my document directories and make versioned backups automatically.

Just wanted to say thanks to all the posters in this thread -- I'm still not sure which product to go with but OoopsBackup is high on the list and this thread has made for some useful insights.  :up:

Curt

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Re: Anyone familiar with Oops!Backup?
« Reply #98 on: May 21, 2011, 08:32 AM »
-hmm... because of this thread I have not installed my Oops! Pro ;-)