ShadowProtect + DeepFreeze + Vista

Hi there,

I'm just about to finalize some choices for my new computer and Vista. Has anybody had any problems, conflicts, restoring Vista with ShadowProtect having DeepFreeze installed?

I don't want to have any unpleasant surprises after buying these two programs, and I would appreciate some feedback if any.

Thanks in advance.

 

I agree, it is common sense that backing up while frozen wouldn't be the right thing to do. As I've noticed some strange behavior with sandboxes in 'thawed' state I was wondering whether anybody having this very setup has noticed anything.

I'm almost certain that they should play well together, except after having had an awful experience with Returnil and 'hibernate' I'm now extra careful (I still think Returnil has a great future, but it is still in beta as far as Vista is concerned).

 

Hello,
My experience has been that imaging while frozen is problematic; imaging while thawed is potentially problematic. As Deepfreeze goes, I uninstall it before imaging, after all, it only takes a reboot after you reinstall, no configuration or anything.

 

Are you using ShadowProtect? Would you care to elaborate when you say "imaging while thawed is potentially problematic"? As DeepFreeze's main target are institutions, I wonder if they'd go through this procedure with imaging programs.

 

When I had DF installed with SP, I had no problems when imaging in Windows XP thawed but I do not have Vista.

Gary

 

Hi Ragzarok,

I followed your advice and uninstalled DeepFreeze before creating a new image with ShadowProtect.

Now reading the DeepFreeze manual, I found a section that refers to imaging.

It's not easy reading IMO, one has to open the DF GUI select 'clone tab' and click 'set flag'. At this stage one can go ahead with the back up operation within Windows. Is that right? Am I missing something? On the other hand using the SP recovery CD to back up should avoid any interaction with DF, whether it is installed or not.

 

IMO for more the one reason its better to use with SP the recovery CD to do any imaging,main reason everything is inactive,basically memory is empty,except for the SP stuff and frosen data to testore !

 

Longview is longtime user of DF and I believe he was using ATI for imaging and he posted a while back that it was simply a matter of thawing before imaging although the DF manhual talked about this setting you reffered to. I never used that but just thawed and used SP. There might be problems but I never had one that I remembered. SP recovery CD is excellent option though.

Gary

 

Hi,
The experience I had with Deepfreeze while in thaw mode is basically that some drivers (firewall, virtual drives) were not able to load AFTER i restore the thawed image. But this is with Acronis True Image. I would image this is unique to my system because it is heavily tweaked.
I've also observed the same problem with FDISR: a restoration of a snapshot taken in thawed mode will have problems with the same drivers not loading.

 

I used FDISR and ATI during more than a year and I keep my on-line snapshot constantly in frozen mode, but I always did my backup/restore in my off-line/rescue snapshot, which has no security softwares, because there is no internet connection.
I do the same with ShadowProtect. I never had any backup or restore problems.

I would find it very unlogical, if any IB-software would have a problem with a frozen mode of any ISR-software.
The task of an IB-software is to backup your harddisk, no matter which softwares are installed and no matter how they are configured, including frozen and thawed mode.

 

ISR softwares (with the exception of FD-ISR AFAIK) install filesystem filter drivers, which may conflict with the drivers of the imaging app.

 

Another good reason for me to keep FDISR, if that is true.
FDISR doesn't work like all the other ISR-softwares and that is probably the main reason.

 

Correct. Also, that's why FD-ISR can't be re-engineered to protect itself against destructive malware (i.e., KillDisk) or why a snapshot eats so much disk space.

 

I can't be the judge of that, but I don't consider both as a problem : disk space enough and the right security software to terminate destructive malware.

 

Were you restoring within Windows or from the ATI recovery CD? Are you specifically talking about Vista or was it XP? Have you ever tried this 'clone tab' 'set flag' procedure at all?

The real unknown field here is Vista, and seen what happened with Returnil I want to make sure everything is checked. DeepFreeze is the closest to what I experienced with ShadowUser (I also understand it's not easy to quickly prepare a new version for Vista), and I don't trust all these new 'shadows', I like the feeling of a solid company when purchasing an application.