Well - having a nice Windows interface is a fine thing - unless you want to automated certain things, which often is sheer impossible with all this Windows wizardry, often requiring a dozen of clicks to accomplish even trivial tasks - just try to automate a Backup of your data with your favourite CD-ROM burning program.
Drive Snapshot has a very easy command line interface:
C:\> SNAPSHOT C: X:\C-Drive.sna
this will backup the C: drive to X:\C-Drive.SNA.
to save several Volumes, simply create a Batch file like
SNAPSHOT C: \\Server\Backups\C-Drive.sna
SNAPSHOT D: \\Server\Backups\D-Drive.sna
SNAPSHOT E: \\Server\Backups\E-Drive.sna
This will backup C:, D:, E: to your server..
Most of the time, it's sensible to limit the size of a single image file to
some maximum value, so it can be written to a CD-ROM. The default maximum size
is 650MB; you can change this with the -L parameter.
To avoid trouble with DOS when restoring your drives, you should keep this below
2000MB.
Equivalent to Bytemode of Advanced Options.
-S0 --
always use Bytemode.
-S8192 -- use Bytemode, if clustersize is
>= 8192
-S100000 -- never use Bytemode (default)
This will empty the Recycle Bin for this drive before starting the backup.
If the cursor is in the top left corner at the time of start, Snapshot
assumes it has been started from a batchfile, and waits for the <ANY> key
at end, so you can control the execution.
This is probably unwanted, if it was started from the scheduler.
This WaitForAnyKey can be suppressed with -W.
For those who have created a shortcut to a customized commandline, but still want to see a graphical progress.
Useful if you have configured a shortcut or similar for automatic backup source and destination, telling the user 'Click here to backup your drive'.
You can request a test of the image for validity, after it has been created.
This will completely reread the image and control it's consistency,
checksums,...
A failure will be returned as Errorlevel > 0.
C:\> SNAPSHOT X:\D-Drive.sna D:
restores the D: drive from X:\D-Drive.sna. This will overwrite all data on the D: drive !!
The limitations are identical to the normal Snapshot Restore.
C:\> SNAPSHOT X:\C-Drive.sna Z: -V
mounts the image X:\C-Drive.SNA as drive Z:
These utilities are sometimes useful, when testing some features. Use them with care and at your own risk (though they should be pretty save to use).
Generate checksums for all files on a drive (useful when verifying)
C:\> SNAPSHOT -!Z C:\*.*
will create checksums for all files C:\*.* incl. subdirectories similar to
Checksum of c: and subdirectories
44959739 \BOOTLOG.TXT,14047
C73BFBF2 \BOOT.INI,813
E83C01A9 \NTDETECT.COM,34724
Clear Clusterslack - useful for FAT16
WARNING: this is a new functionality, which hasn't been regression tested yet. Use at your own risk!
C:\> SNAPSHOT -!ZAP C:\*.*
For all files on drive C:, the unused area between the End Of File and the used cluster size will be filled with zero's. This helps to make the disk image smaller, as zero's compress very nicely.
This operation is relatively slow (~100 files per second), but can be started whenever you want, and has not to be repeated often to be useful.
For each file on the drive, the following action is performed:
before a file is opened, it is checked, that it doesn't have special attributes.
If not, Snapshot tries to open it in a very exclusive mode, to make sure, no other program is currently using it. Snapshot will then append a couple of zero's to the file (up to the next cluster boundary), make sure these bytes are written to disk, truncate the file to it's original size, and reset the original file access times.
Don't expect wonders, but on a large FAT16 drive with cluster size 16K, this may account for ~20% smaller images; savings for NTFS and FAT32 are much less.
This feature is complementary to the byte mode feature.