Raxcos First Defense????

I am looking at this program as I want to get a user friendly program that I can have available if heaven forbit my computer decides to take a bite for the dust.
it hasn't happened in the 2 years that I have had it and I have seen some articles about this program and wondered if any member has had experience with it?

I was thinking about storing the snapshots on my 256kb Secure Lexar jump drive, although my computer has a 10 gig partition on the 40 gig hard drive.

I would appreciate comments on anyones experience with this program.
Thankyou.

 

The program is an excellent program, in my opinion, but you cannot store snapshots on another hard drive; just like Norton's Goback, the Snapshots can only be stored on the same hard drive that you are protecting. Good luck.

Acadia

 

Hello Acadia, do you know how much space the snapshop is using on the
hard drive?

 

Yes, the Snaphot captures your entire c:drive minus the the .tmp files, swapfile, hibernation file and recycle bin; even the exceptions make sense. So if you have a 4gb hard drive and make a snapshot, you will now have almost an 8gb hard drive. If you make two Snapshots you will have almost 12gb of material. Yes, FirstDefense uses a lot of space, that is its only drawback, but it needs to do this to perform its magic.

For folks who want a similar program that does not use as much space I can recommend GoBack. GoBack and FD are the two best programs that I ever used, but only use FD if disk space is not an issue. If disk space is not an issue you will not believe the flexibility the FD provides, whereas Goback can "goback", with FD you can go back, forward, sideways ...

Acadia

 

i take it then that this program is similar to M$ system restore but Better.
Go Back is similar also??
The reason that I ask this is because I don't use system restore because it has been unreliable. I set a point before I install a program or download updates and it turns around and says "that no changes have been made". From the beginning of purchasing the computer this has been the situation. For awhile it worked and then it didn't. i took it into the repair depot and they advised that my toshiba notebook is not the only one with these problems.
they advised simply disenabling it. It was also checked out for malware, viruses etc. as well and everything was fine.
so now i have been 2 years with no crashes and no restore point and an awful lot of programs on my computer.
I do have Norton Professional systemworks with Go Back in the program, however have never installed it.
perhaps rather than spending the extra $ I should install this program.
How much resources does it use and is it a reliable program

I would appreciate comments.
i was told that First Defense is not for the Novice is that correct, that the learning curve is steep and I am a Novice!!!

i have read some of the instructions and see mention of terms like "anchoring" and don't understand terminologies like that and thus believe that this program may be a little too advanced for me, I don't think that I would know how to configure it and my notebook has a ghost partition of 9.76 gigs with 3.56 gigs, and C drive 20.7 free gigs and 27.4 gigs free. and 1.9 Ghz and 512 RAM and Windows xp Home Edition.

Sounds to me like the First Defense would take up a lot of space.

How would this compare to Go Back, the program that I have on Norton Professional System Works and the above information that I have given about the space used on my notebook in the prior paragraphs.

I look forward to comments.
Thankyou

i was reading a comment in my norton professional systemworks that says if I upgrade my OS or add service packs i must uninstall Go Back and then not be able to use its backups to restore my hard drive? What does that mean?

Does it make sense for me, if I have enough resources to install GoBack

And how much space would it possibly use up, as the manual does not really say.

I hope that there are some members that can comment on this.

Thankyou.













Does this apply to patches as well

 

Hello Wills. A few months back I, too, was searching for a way to protect myself in the event my hard drive died suddenly (or I got a nasty virus or trojan I couldn't get rid of, or I got some configurations messed up so badly I couldn't fix them). Briefly, here is what prompted my search and what I did.

I few months ago I attempted to install Service Pack 2 on my kids' Windows XP Home PC. The PC had Norton GoBack (from SystemWorks 2004 standard) installed and running on it at the time. Although I know better, I forgot to disable GoBack before inserting the SP2 CD. When SP2 attempted to install my PC totally crashed and I ended up loosing everything on the hard drive. And since I had no backup of any nature, I spent the day last Saturday reinstalling software.

GoBack is a program that runs in the background and records the content of your hard drive at periodic restore points in its file, which is stored on your hard drive. (When I was using GoBack, everything I had - OS, application software & data files - were in my one and only C: partition. I don't know how GoBack works on a multi-partitioned PC.) The GoBack file stores restore points on a rolling basis, meaning at any point in time you can go back to restore points created during the last 2 - 3 days (depending on how much space you have allocated to the GoBack file (a setting you can only make during installation) and how many GB of hard drive are being utilized).

GoBack has saved me from disasters 3 - 4 times over the past few years. But because it is running in the background continually monitoring your PC, you have to turn it off when you do something really big, like installing Service Packs (you can leaving it on when installing normal software). And this defeats the purpose, doesn't it? If I have to disable GoBack in order to install SP2, and SP2 screws up my PC, GoBack will be of no use in reverting my PC to its prior state.

Ater I crashed my kids PC, therefore, I investigated Raxco's First Defense (FD) and imaging software.

I never purchased FD, but read rave reviews here on Wilders (I assume you did a Search on FD on this forum!) and FD does have definate advantages over GoBack:
- since FD is a file snapshot of your hard drive, there is nothing to disable for big installations like SP2. If SP2 screws up your PC, you can actually revert back to a pre-SP2 state with FD, but not with GoBack.
- FD files are stored on your hard drive until you delete them. If something is wrong with your PC, GoBack gives you a 2 - 3 day rolling window of good restore points. If you wait longer, say 5 days (because maybe you didn't know the PC was messed up), than those 2 - 3 days to revert using GoBack, then all your restore points will be corrupted as well. With FD, you can revert to a restore file you made a month ago. Also, with FD, you can make as many snapshots of your C: partition as your hard drive can hold (you can only make snapshots of the C: OS partition, however).
- FD doesn't continuously monitor your system, therefore doesn't impair PC performance.

When turning on the PC, both GoBack and FD bring up screens prior to the OS booting up. This enable you to restore even though your OS is dead.

A disadvantage to both FD & GoBack, however, is that they both must store their restore file on your hard drive. So if your hard drive crashes, you loose everything.

For that reason I investigated image programs. After reading and posting to many threads, I finally trialed, then purchased, BootIt NG (by TeraByte Unlimited) for $35. BootIt not only images, but has a partition manager as well. I image partitions to an external 250 GB Western Digital hard drive. Now even if my hard drive goes bad, I can relatively quickly restore everything to a new hard drive. I already used BootIt to restore my C: partition (containing my OS and application software, but not my data files) to a prior state rather than delving deeply into troubleshoot for why my Norton AntiVirus LiveUpdate feature quit working.

"Anchoring" is described on the Raxco First Defense website, by the way.

Regards,
Stro