The unofficial Shadow Defender Support Thread.

It's working perfectly here. I use it every day now since I decided to uninstall Sandboxie after the Sophos debacle...

 

Have also been using SD on XP for 7-8 years and it has worked great.

 

Latest version of SD has been running on my W10 (always the most current build) without any issues whatsoever.

 

there is incompatibility of shadow defender with wps office: if some folder is excluded from shadow mode (example desktop) and example doc file is created in that folder, then after closing and opening that file and editing it (and saving changes) after reboot there will be .tmp files present and changes to doc file after its creation will be discarded.

 

Hi,

I used to extensively test Shadow Defender a while back, and found that it was unreliable when writing to disk while in Shadow Mode, meaning that some files end up corrupted. It could reproduce it on several systems, and other users here had similar experiences. So, if you want to have an excluded folder, I recomend testing every file you write to it. It does not matter if it's a wps office doc file or anything else. If the file is correct while in Shadow Mode, it will remain corrent after reboot. When file corruption happens, it's immediate and unrelated to the "commit" and "exclude" functions in SD.

 

Can SD auto start to (SM), when clicking: FF, Chrome, or TB?

 

You mean like Sandboxie? Unfortunately not, at least not directly...if i recall correctly, there are command line options, so maybe there's a way to first enter shadow mode , and then launch the browser from a batch file or something like that.

 

Sandboxie can launch, when clicking browser? SD seem to almost abandoned! I like SD, but I'm too lazy, to start SD then, start the browser. Likewise (if so), close the 'browser/email app', will that exit the sandbox?

In SM, i can dl something, try in SM, if ok, exit SM, & re- dl it. That's easy, as most time is surfing not dl.

Paid version sandbox for, FF, Chrome T-bird, as opposed to SD's whole hdd in SM?

Thanks

 

I don't think it's due to incompatibility of SD but rather due to office app's features to show last used files - in WPS in option window and module "main and saving" (or someting like that because i have Polish version). That means that WPS is saving that files in specific location not only on e.g. desktop and when you open that document it will be opened from last saved before virtualisation mode.

 

Well, there are fears that Sandboxie might be abandoned soon...it's not commercial anmore, but a freeware tool. We'll see how development goes after it becomes open source (that's what Sophos is planning). But yes, even in the shareware version, you could create custom shortcuts for browsers that would launch them sandboxed. In the paid (now free) version, browsers launch sandboxed automatically.

Shadow Defender is more powerful, as it virtualizes everything in your system, but the main problem is that it was unreliable for data integrity on any system I tried to run it on (other users here had the same problems). That's the only reason I'm not using SD ...and yes, i'm a Sandboxie user.

 

I use my production PC 10 hrs/day, 5 days/week and it's been running SD 1.4 build 680 (on Win10) for the past 18 months without experiencing any data/system corruption, or for that matter any other issues. Before then, I ran earlier versions of SD on Win7 for several years and never had any data/system corruption. I should add that my C-volume is always in Shadow Mode (except when I need to update software). All of my personal and job-related data reside on other drive volumes. That way I'm able to keep SD operations simple - no exclusions or commitments! ....so perhaps that accounts for my success with SD over the years?

 

Shadow Defender has always been reliable, and lately in conjunction with my new SSD, it is blazing fast to enter and to reboot out of shadow mode. The only time I have experienced problems it was not long ago, what happened was that my original 1TB hard disk was slowly dying (I think it took more than 6 months to finally give up completely to the point I could not boot into Windows). The bottom line in my experience, if something is not working perfectly with SD, I would check the health of the drive among other things.

 

All corrupt files are indeed gone after exiting shadow mode. Also, no corruption ever occurred when Shadow Defender was disabled. The same applies for drives where shadow mode was not activated, while C: being shadowed. No corruption ever occurred on those.

I'd like to note that if you do not see any corruption does not mean that it's not there. If a user is just browsing the web in shadow mode, the files most likely to become corrupt are in the cache, which is no big deal, and will most likely go unnoticed.

Another way to look for corruption (besides checking hashes like i've described a few years ago), is to copy many large .jpegs to a shadowed drive. It does not happen every time, but you should visually notice corruption on one or more of them, pretty soon.

 

SD is giving me issues again, installed a couple weeks ago, entered and exited shadow mode 3 or 4 times, no issues. The last time, a couple days ago, resulted in a blue screen,something about there were issues and they are gathering information. After blue screen I had no internet, tried everything, nothing worked to fix it, had to revert to an earlier image.

 

Even if the BSOD happen in shadow mode, a minidump file should have been created. If it happens again, you could use that to check what's responsible for the crash.

In my experience, crashes in Shadow Mode should not change anything on the system. In that regard, Shadow Defender works as it should. However, if I commited all changes to the system disk, all bets were off, and stuff like "no internet connection" are plausible.

 

Describe your system configuration (OS and all startup software) ...and your SD settings!
Also, do you recall what you were doing when you encountered a BSOD?

 

W10 with Defender and MB4. Don't have SD setting as I uninstalled but didn't change any settings so I would have been using the default settings.

I was rebooting to exit shadow mode.

 

Another 2-Questions:

1. You didn't set RAM as write cache in SD?
2. How do you know that SD caused the BSOD?

 

1. No
2. I don't know for sure just assuming as BSOD happened right after exiting shadow mode.

 

Do you have Fast startup (aka: fast boot, hiberboot, hybrid boot, or hybrid shutdown) enabled in Windows 8/ 10? Tony recommends that it be disabled when using Shadow Defender. Just a thought.

Another thought is. If you were going from Shadow Mode and staying in Shadow mode after re-boot that it might be something to do with WSAENOBUFS: 10055 or ephemeral port exhaustion which will not allow connection of Internet after reaching exhaustion point.
I'm no expert but suffer from WSAENOBUFS: 10055 frequently. There are registry changes that could be made in advance to change the exhaustion point but you have to be very careful. I think a reboot is required to keep settings.

'WSAENOBUFS: 10055: No buffer space available.

Overview::

Procedure:

The WSAENOBUFS is returned because you are calling a port that was recently used and has not yet been released. If you try to use a TCP port that is already in use, the operating system (OS) will trigger an error, but not because the OS is behaving improperly, but just to warn that the APPLICATION making use of the OS sys call is trying to do something that is incorrect: you cannot bind two different applications to the same TCP port.

The registry parameter MaxUserPort needs to be set..

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters On the Edit menu, click New, and then add the following registry entry then reboot Windows.

Value Name: MaxUserPort Value Type: DWORD Value data: 65534 Valid Range: 5000-65534 (decimal).'

If it is ephemeral port exhaustion please Google it and research it yourself before doing anything. I'm not saying that you should do anything.

This is one of those tricky problems

mickysoft explanation is here

and more info here

It probably isn't any of these things but just a thought.

Patrick

 

Hello everyone I have problems after activation and enable SD Everytime SD work fine after activation suddenly SD windows disappear and asking for activation again and password!!! I disapel anti-virus (avast) and turn-off windows defragment but Sam problem
I didn't add password before SD v 1.4.0.680
My windows 10 v1909 and ssd hard drive

 

Also known as fast boot, hiberboot, hybrid boot, or hybrid shutdown

 

fast startup on- no.
also, was not going from Shadow mode and staying in Shadow mode.

Thanks.