10 Personal

Table Of Contents

Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is designed to provide the copy/backup infrastructure for the

Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003/2008 operating systems. It offers a reliable mechanism to create

consistent point-in-time copies of data known as shadow copies. Developed by Microsoft in close cooperation

with the leading copy/backup solution vendors on the market, it is based on a snapshot technology concept.

Initiated by a VSS aware copy/backup utility, VSS creates snapshots for the selected volumes and represents

them as virtual read-only devices, called volume shadow copies. Once the shadow copies are created, the

copy/backup utility starts processing the data while applications keep writing to original volumes.

Unlike Paragon Hot Processing the VSS technology provides a unique possibility to make a synchronous

snapshot of multiple volumes. This very feature can be particularly beneficial when backing up active SQL

Server 2003, Exchange 2003 or Oracle databases located on multiple volumes the way it is recommended by

Microsoft to improve the level of database performance and reliability, thus providing 100-percent data

consistency.

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To use VSS it is necessary to have a mounted 300 MB+ NTFS partition.

GPT VERSUS MBR

GUID Partition Table (GPT) is the next generation of a hard disk partitioning scheme developed to lift restrictions

of the old MBR. Being a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel to replace

the outdated PC BIOS, it offers a number of crucial benefits:

 Up to 128 primary partitions for the Windows implementation (only 4 in MBR);

 The maximum allowed partition size is 18 exabytes (only 2 terabytes in MBR);

 More reliable thanks to replication and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) protection of the partition

table;

 A well defined and fully self-identifying partition format (data critical to the platform operation is

located in partitions, but not in un-partitioned or hidden sectors as this is the case with MBR).

APPLE BOOT CAMP

Boot Camp is a special utility to help you set up a dual boot system (Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows XP/Vista) on

Intel-based Macs. It enables to securely re-partition your hard disk (resize an existing HFS+ partition to create a

separate partition for Windows) and then launch the installation process. With Boot Camp all the necessary

drivers will be at your disposal. Moreover after Windows has been installed it will serve as a boot manager to

choose what operating system to start up.

Our program provides the ability to successfully backup/restore this kind of configurations as well as redistribute

unused space between Mac OS X and Windows partitions.

64-BIT SUPPORT

The bulk of software today is written for a 32-bit processor. It can meet the requirements of almost any end user.

However that is not the case when dealing with servers processing large amounts of data with complex

calculations of very large numbers. That is where 64-bit architecture comes into play.