Rescue and Recovery's disk management is pathetic and senseless, please help.

[Ozmo]

I'm using an X61 (which i've been very happy with, by the way, not that this is relevant) which has Rescue and Recovery installed by default. This is okay, as I see the value of regular backups. However, the default setting is to keep a history of 5 of the last backups. Each backup consumes ~10gb of space for a total of about ~50gb if I let the program run as it came configured, which is totally unacceptable for a machine that has 100gb of storage. That's my first complaint.

Second, I've attempted to neuter the R&R's idiotic disk usage behavior by reducing its maximum number of incremental backups. Oh, trouble. The program will not allow me to have any less than *3* incremental backups, for about ~30gb disk usage. Why does this program insist on dictating how many backups I choose to keep on hand? Ridiculous. I think 2 incremental backups would be reasonable, but R&R will not allow this.

Third, I have also attempted to repair the situation by deleting old and unnecessary backups. Oh, trouble again. Upon attempting to delete some of these backups to *free up space*, it notifies me that it cant, because it *lacks available space* (!!!!).

Whoever designed this program's behavior should start thinking about a career change, imho. Or perhaps I am at fault and it is merely my ignorance that is preventing me from using this application properly. I do hope it's the latter, as I typically have great faith in anything produced by IBM/Lenovo... but this just has me extremely frustrated. Please send any words of advice, I thank you all in advance.

[CATman]

I do not have an answer to this, but if you can tell me where I can go to actually attempt to delete the "backup" that R&R *did* create on my local drive, I would be most appreciative.  I had never used it (R&R) before (and I have used TP's going back *a long* time!) so I assumed when I tried it the first time that it would ask me where to put the backup, e.g. on the network, external drive, &c.  Instead, it started backing up *everything* to my local drive.  While it was running, I had to close the Tablet, which apparently did not make R&R happy.

Bottom line: my 100GB HD is already down to 25GB free (and it is only a month old), the "backup" apparently did not complete successfully so R&R will not recognize it to delete it.  So, I have a worthless backup taking up a ton o' space and I cannot find it to delete it.  HELP!!!  Next time, I will know to have R&R set up *before* running it to back up to the network. (or, based upon the original post to this thread, I may just manually back up my data or save all my important stuff on the network to begin with and let the sysadmin guys worry about backups!)

If anyone even knows what the name of the backup file(s) is/are, that would be a start.

[max919]

HAHA. how bout when I bought my X60 with a 60G hard drive and after 30 days the back-up was 48g..spent 2 months deleting everything I could, thinking back-up had been  turned off. FINALLY placed a support call, and within 5 seconds the engineer who did not even have to listen to the end of my issue, directed me how to turn off the back-ups. Then last month, after one of the updates was incompatabe with my network card...the system file got corrupted...and I had NO backups...

So, basically Lenovo told me that back-ups should always be done to a remote drive...and yes you need all three. Did I mention that I had to purchase a Lenovo USB Hard drive in order to recover, as it was pre-loaded with their RR software (and one from the store would not work from the RR that I was booting to?).  Figure why I had to spend $150 for a 80G USB HD, when in ANY store I could buy a 120G USB HD for $100.

Good news was I could recover my entire HD onto the LenovoUSB HD, then had to restore HD to factory and reinstall everything.

So, go buy a USB HD while your system still works, and run the  back-ups onto that!!

[dbucher]

Personnally these "You have no choices options" made it impossible for me to make backups !

I wanted to backup to a crypted partition on a USB external HD drive, but with Rescue and recovery you cannot define a drive letter as backup !!!

You can either choose "external USB drive" (which is not what I want).
Or you can choose "network drive" (but can't specify a letter, only \\host\partition), useless in my case !

=> Result, I had to buy another software...

Ridiculous...

I really feel all Thinkvantage software are developped against users without any feedback from customers...