Shadow Defender, Shadow Protect, Shadow User - too much shadow!

I'm trying to investigate the various imaging and rollback programs and there seem to be a few "Shadow" variants which doesn't help trying to remember which one is which!

Now if I am right ShadowProtect is like Acronis TrueImage, useful for imaging and restoring entire partition or disks and restoring whole thing.

Shadow User (from same company as above?) and Shadow Defender seem to be more virtualization programs? What are the differences between these two? They both seem to do the same thing. How do they compare to something like Deep Freeze and Rollback RX? All seem to have the ability to freeze a system while allowing certain folders and zones to be left unfrozen. Though I'm not sure about Deep Freeze allowing individual folders to remain unfrozen? Any others to be aware of which fall into the category these last few ones seem to fall into?

 

Most of the "shadow" and related ones described in Light virtualization: Returnil/PowerShadow/ShadowDefender/ShadowUser Pro are partition state preservation applications. The state of protected zones (typically partition level) are maintained a some predefined state with the rollback occurring at a restart. There are minor variations on this theme, but that's the basic scheme.

Right - both are partition/disk image and file backup applications

See thread mentioned above.

Deep Freeze is akin to the light virtualization programs, but is generally used such that virtualization is the default on state - it's generally used to maintain a system in a defined and static state.

Rollback Rx uses sector remapping to allow snapshots of multiple system states to be dynamically preserved and returned to at will. The remapping procedure does mean that the state of the file system becomes ill defined outside of the Rollback Rx environment.

Blue

 

Thanks for the info and that related thread. Very informative