Boot everytime from image?

I found out at uni today that every time their PCs boot up they load from an image. I figure that is kind of like "Steady State" yeah? but not

Was also told that they can edit their image, whenever and in a flash.

How they doing that?

Is it possible with Acronis?

I love the idea cos you would have a fresh clean platform everytime you log in.

But..of course... an administrator doesnt want to lose say new firewall entries made, passwords, and malware updates etc etc

To me it sounds like there is a way to integrate these very quickly and the 30 minute process of reimaging once a month can be skipped.

Must be a way?

 

The computer systems in libraries have this feature also. So no matter what you do on the systems, when they are re-booted it is "like new". I think it is called "something freeze"? Maybe Google would know.

I suppose you can do this manually with True Image but I don't know if it can be automated.

 

Faronics DeepFreeze
Windows SteadyState

 

Your best bet is to use returnil, and freeze windows at your convenience. Example bootup windows download your virus updates, then freeze windows with returnil, when frozen windows runs in memory. Nothing is written to the hard drive when Frozen. The computers at the university or librarys or actually running from ram memory, they load from there regular hard drive but once in windows, the hard drive is out of the loop.
True image wouldn't be practical for doing that, since it would take too long to reverse any changes you made. Not to mention the wear and tear of restoring your c: partition on a daily basis. Depending on the size of your hard drive it can take a long time, it wouldn't happen in a flash.
Did I read correctly you only image once a month?

 

I wonder if Try and Decide could be pressed into a poor man's freeze software.

I suppose another way, might be to make an SZ make an image of the steady state system and then use the F11 capability to restore the image at each boot up - not as neat as the real software of course and would require a new image each time a wanted change to the OS was made.

You'd have to have the OS image on it's own partition and ensure that all installed programs were on another.

 

Yeah ive known of Steadystate for a while. Thats more for secure user use and not administrators. Its an easy concept really.

returnil sounds interesting. Kind of a virtual concept. Would need so much RAM to do that i figure. And yeah it does sound weathering on the partition.

I guess my uni, supply the image from the server, and once again its on the user basis and not administrator. What intrigued me was how quickly the image could be edited, and reapplied instantly.

jonyjoe81 my imaging techniques are unusual and probably incorrect. I have multiple partitions (XP, Vista, Downloads, Backed Ups, Paging Files) so basically anything that i gain that is valuable to me, during computer use, gets put onto the Download partition (safe area)

I use true image to make a perfectly set up image of my OS. say Vista for instance. Its configured perfectly, updated and optimised. So when the OS starts to get faultly, i just reinstall the image.

And then she runs beautifully again.

Problems come when of course there are virus and software updates.

I then have to make a new image say once a month (So hence its updated).

I think im doing it wrong.

 

If i imaged more regulary i might as well just use system restore. and not true image

 

What I was talking about is the frequency of you backups. A monthly backup is probably too much time between backups.
For instance I do a weekly backup, plus I always have a older (1 or 2 month backup saved, just in cased my weekly is also infected etc). I never bother with the incrementals.
I also disable system restore on my computers and just rely on "true image" to restore me to an earlier time. I have 100 percent confidence that true image will work, system restore for me was unreliable when I used it, and I don't think it can fix a malware problem.
I only restore in "worst case" scenario. That's why having a "freeze" type program available is useful, it provide a quick restoration (simple reboot to return to an earlier time is all that is required). Returnil when running only protects your c: drive, doesn't protect other partitions, and you won't even know it's running.
Even with system restore or returnil, you still need true image. It is the last line of defense. Nothing beats doing a complete restoration in a worst case scenario.

 

yeah i agree, system restore is useless

fair enough with weekly backups, u must figure that if its working well its worth keeping. With so much use week to week into the pc, it wouldnt feel clean to me.

Plus i dont understand how to restore an increment. In restore do u restore to original full backup, and then restore the weekly increments on top of that. Or just retore the weekly increment and True image knows to incllude the full image.

Or maybe your backups are all full backups.

Me i just have a full backup, use it for a month, take notes along the way, and redit the image or update around a month later. But its not going smoothly or to plan. Seem to get minor issues that make me wanna restart the whole image grrr

Its important to me that the image is very very clean, updated and optimised