Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Thanks a lot, Alt, for your quick and very clear explanations. Fog is dissipating in my brain. I had no idea that R-Drive Image was so powerful as to work efficiently even if the computer were running other programs. Anyway, when I'm doing backups, I am always careful not to have anything running at the same time as the backup program. But there may be some hidden activity running in the background, so , to play safe, I'll probably leave checked all the checkboxes of the group "Snapshot providers" and check also the "Ignore read disk errors", since my computers are not servers. Thus there should be no ( or insignificant) speed penalty.
Very best regards
Francois JOLY

The settings on the Backup Options panel are mainly for servers. If your computer is a personal one, you may leave them as they are.
A snapshot is an image of a disk taken at a certain time moment.
Well, backing up a large disk may be quite a lengthy process. As it is being done without stopping the system and all other programs that may be running during the process, it may appear that something write data on that part of the disk which has been already copied to the image. R-Drive Image correctly processes such situation by monitoring the process of writing data to the disk and re-writes the image file when necessary, but it is a good idea to minimize data writing during the process of image creation.
Snapshot providers notify applications that a snapshot is being taken so they may refrain from writing something on the disk, or, at least, minimize such writing. Sometimes that may slow disk backup, but that rarely occurs. That is why the options can be unchecked. If you don't have programs like databases running, you may leave these settings as they are.

R-Drive Image can stop creating the image and immediately notify the user when it meets bad sectors, or may continue working and notify the user at the end. This settings are important for corporate servers where the cost of data loss may be unimaginable. If you don't have bad sectors, you won't see those warnings.

AUX indeed means "auxiliary". These are applications that you may want to run before and after image creation. For example, you may want to stop some program, then clean your computer from some temporary files, then create an image, and then start that stopped program.

The steps in <Backup Options> are quite mysterious to me, even after reading carefully the Help.Mostly I don't unsderstand the concept of "snapshot". Please exuse my dumbness !
_ 1) "Snapshot providers" What if all checkboxes are unchecked ? And what is the point of notifying system applications that a snapshot is being taken ? If using "snapshot service" is useful , as it seems from what you say in Help, why is there a choice to bypass it ? Finally if all the options in "Snapshot providers" are checked, Will not the image building process be significally slowed down ? ( could be the reason why a choice for not using snapshots is available).

_ 2) checkbox "Ignore disk read errors (bad sectors)" My understanding is R-Drive Image would cough or stop when trying to read a bad sector, in which case this box should be always checked. Is that correct ? I must say I did not check the box when making my images, but that could mean my computers have no bad sectors on their HD ( or these are correctly neutralized)

_ 3) What exactly is "AUX" ? (my guess is "auxilliary" but this is undefined) BTW I'm glad the program says you can leave it blank !
Well thanks in advance for clarifications