Who needs it?

This program was being developed with enterprise scenario in mind. SPB Clone was initially supposed to be applicable for two major use-cases:

Deployment of a solution involving many identical devices

Suppose, your enterprise has in service many (maybe hundreds) identical Pocket PC devices. All these devices are supposed to be used in the same way, and have identical software and settings configuration. It takes a lot of time to configure necessary registry settings and deploy desired applications to a device that must be configured from zero. When one needs to configure a new device, re-configure the old one, or reconfigure the whole pack of devices he must perform all the same operations, like installing programs, changing registry, adding files, etc. This often requires attention to details, good memory and, last but not least, some skills and knowledge. All this procedure can take from 10 to 30 minutes for one single device. Therefore if you need to configure the whole set of devices, the entire process could take up to several weeks. And you may not be sure that you made no mistakes and did it all right for each device.

If you use SPB Clone, you will have to configure only one device and clone it to other ones. The whole process is performed automatically, with minimum human intervention and as fast as possible.

Deployed solution support

Suppose, one of your involved devices, equipped with your application, which is utilized in another city, got out of order. Your main application deployed on the device doesn't work and it needs fast repair. You could waste a lot of time going there and restoring its functionality or trying to solve the problem by phone.

Instead you use SPB Clone, create several storage cards with clone images of a configured Pocket PC, and provide your employees with these cards. In any software crash case your employee can hard-reset the device and plug the card in. The clone image will be restored automatically.

How it works?

Cloning

After launching, the SPB Clone application turns the Pocket PC device into a special mode with the only one running application - SPB Clone. This application takes all your files, databases, and registry and puts it all into an image. This image can be created in two ways. First, it can be created on a storage card so that it will start the restoration automatically just when a user inserts the card into a Pocket PC device. Second, this image can be created as an executable file in a custom location. This file can also be transferred and executed on another Pocket PC device.

If you wish you can compress the image at the cloning stage, which will reduce its size. Moreover, you can enable password protection using the AES data encryption algorithm (Rijndael).

Restoration

We made image restoration as simple as possible. If one has a clone image card, he should just insert it into the device. The self-extracting and self-executing clone image will automatically start. After the restoration the new Pocket PC will be identical to the cloned one. Thus you can quickly deploy your business solution onto a number of enterprise devices.

Unique settings for clones

The clone devices become identical to the parent one in all aspects including the device names and the network settings. Identical device names are not welcome because neither you nor the desktop PC could distinguish between them. Identical network settings are not welcome either because they will cause a network conflict. Each device should have a unique IP address and a host name.

Providing unique names and IP settings

Most manufacturers store their device names and network settings in registry. This makes possible to successfully resolve the network settings update problem by means of a registry update initialization file. This file contains templates for device names and IP settings.

Please, read more information about the registry update file in a user manual (PDF) at SPB's website:
http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/clone/spb_clone_user_manual.pdf

License

You can download a demo or a full version of SPB Clone. The demo version provides the same functionality, but on the clone copies from time to time there will appear demo version notifications. If you download the full version of SPB Clone, you will have no restrictions in using it.

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