whats a recommended program for maintaining a stable windows environment. i have tried the following rollback v10. - it seems to work for a maximum of 30 days before it crashes the system forcing a reformat. clean slate v7- does most of the things it claims, but after messing with the registry (for testing purposes) it crashes forcing a reinstall. deep freeze standard - (bought it from faronics) does everything it claims but after being installed for a while it seems to make windows unstable unless you boot thawed. shadow defender - same as deep freeze. i dont care if the system is virtualized or not so long as its stable.
Macrium Refelect, and external Hard drive. Installed lots of crap that I would had to reformat before, with this setup formatting is a thing of the past. Tried all those internal back-ups and they all failed eventually. Restoring is as fast as rollback rx
I do the same as @Circuit . I use REFLECT as my main imaging environment (GFS - Grandfather, Father, Son) and against that same image chain, I snapshot my System whenever I'm testing or Honeypotting for a virus test. Returning to a recent System configuration from a failed test state requires BOOTing to a disk resident WinPE BOOT environment and the Recovery operation is very quick due to the fact that only the DATA that has changed since the referenced time point you're going back to is actually restored to the volume in question. The process is a tiny bit longer than Rollback RX but, basically, has been bulletproof for me.
I used Deep Freeze in the past with XP and it has never ever affected windows stability. Shadow Defender is still my favorite program and I've used it with XP, Vista, Win 8/8.1, and Win 10 and it has never created problems regarding stability. One thing for sure none of these programs are meant to be used forever in shadow/frozen mode as the hard-disk volume will inevitably increase and eventually performance might be affected because of excessive fragmentation, but why would anyone stay in shadow mode for weeks on end? Macrium is excellent but it is an imaging program, the paid version is fast but so is a reboot from shadow mode.
Shadow Defender is my favourite...ca 8 years on my machines. Actually it's the solid-rock base of all my security combos.
I don't trust Rollback or it's ilk. I used to use Instant Recovery and it was reliable, but slow. Macrium has worked fine, I do use it as a snapshot type program which also doubles with images and it has never let me down.
sorry for the late reply and any confusion caused, i am on windows 10 pro x64 460gig SSD drive unpartioned and its entire capacity is used by windows and unpartitioned all the latest updates and patches are installed and working, where possible i was using the latest v10.xxx and the latest build available at the time and all other programs with the exception of rollback (i dont remember the build but its the same as posted elsewhere on here and i havent tried any other builds because it takes a max of 30 days to tell if they work). in the case of the crash with rollback, i dont get any errors or warnings and i havent used or loaded any disk utils.
to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding, all the software was installed seperately and at different times. all the software was legit not trials or demo versions and kept up to date with the latest available update or version.
on the 460 gig ssd drive there is a single partion used by windows and the windows rescue, but i am not sure if thats a partition
here is a screenshot of my disk 0 - 2 partitions (1 for reserved, 1 for windows and the remaining unused space)
Garry, thanks for the screenshot. Disk 0 has 3 partitions. Disk 1 appears to have only 1 partition but it is a GPT disk so it also has a MSR (Microsoft Reserved Partition). The MSR doesn't show in Disk Management but it does show in Diskpart. Disk 0... 3 partitions Disk 1... 2 partitions When you create a backup image of Disk 0, make sure you include all partitions.
does this mean that when using rollback i need to enable rollback on all 3 partitions for it to work correctly. regarding imaging backups i normally backup the entire physical disk as an image.
Up until a few weeks ago I would have replied, "Macrium Reflect, InstantRecovery, and ShadowDefender". But on my new system I am using Win10 for the very first time and I have not figured out how to use ShadowDefender with Windows automatic updating. ShadowDefender, excellent program, but I am currently using MR and IR. Good luck. Acadia
using shadow defender with windows 10 (or any other version) you need to leave shadow mode, reboot, update as normal, and after updating is complete re enter shadow mode
