One of our support guys just asked me if this was possible (it is), and I figured I might as well share a copy of my response with the community, just in case.

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So, when ImageManager removes image files, the user can specify if they want to move the files to a subdirectory instead of delete them.  Sometimes users may want to mount an image in that subdirectory.  The problem is that most of the mount tools require the image files to all be in the same directory.  However, there is a way that the user can legitimately mount an image in the subdirectory without moving any of the image files from the subdirectory into the parent directory.  They can do this using the image.exe and mount.exe command-line tools, like so:

1)       First, they need to use image.exe to resolve the “image chain” (the list of files from the base on down to the file they intend to mount).  Fortunately, image.exe is capable of resolving a chain given the combined files from more than one directory.  In this example let’s say that the primary directory managed by ImageManager is D:\Backups and the subdirectory into which ImageManager is moving (instead of deleting) image files is D:\Backups\Incrementals.  Now let’s say that the user has an incremental, C_VOL-b001-i123.spi in the D:\Backups\Incrementals directory which they wish to mount.  They must first use image.exe to resolve the chain using the combination of files in both directories, using the following command-line command.  Note that the quotes are necessary (don’t leave them out) to prevent problems with paths with spaces, and absolutely essential for the (d)elimiter parameter.

   a.       image.exe qp "D:\Backups\Incrementals\C_VOL-b001-i123.spi" "e=D:\Backups" "d=|" f=fsqr > mountMychain.cmd

2)       Next, open mountMyChain.cmd in Notepad.  It should contain one big long line which is the list of files in the chain.  We’ll now modify this text file so that it contains the command that will mount this chain.  We do so using the command-line mount.exe command, which will allow us to mount a chain even if the files come from different directories.  So we edit mountMyChain.cmd like so:

   a.       mount.exe m "D:\Backups\C_VOL-b001.spf|...|D:\Backups\Incrementals\C_VOL-b001-i123.spi" d=Q p=myPassword

Now we simply execute mountMyChain.cmd (maybe copy it into the ShadowProtect program files directory so that it’s in the same directory as mount.exe and image.exe, if it’s not already there), which in this case will mount that image to drive Q:.

Note that in 2a., when you edit the script to add the mount.exe command, you must place a quote character at the very beginning of the chain (list of files) and a second quote at the very end of the chain.  You must also specify a drive letter, and a password if your image chain happens to be encrypted, otherwise you’ll get an error 5 (access denied) error.  I have underlined the text that you will need to add to the start and end of the existing text in  mountMyChain.cmd.  Also note that in the example in 2a. I did not spell out the entire chain (I skipped all of the files between the first file and the last file).  Your script MUST NOT skip any of the files – your script will have a much larger list of files, generally, and you must not skip them like I did – I only skipped them so that I could fit the text in this email.  The real script would not modify the files in the list but would use them exactly as they were spelled out, simply enclosing them in quotes (one quote at the start, and another quote at the very end of the list of files).

After mounting, the GUI can be used to dismount.  However, mount.exe (the command-line mount tool) can also dismount.  The easiest way to dismount is to use the “mount.exe c” (close all mounted images) command, which will dismount anything which is currently mounted.