Anyone tried the fairly new release of FirstDefense - Rescue? This appears to be a somewhat pared back and revised re-release of the older and no-longer-available "FD-ISR" program.
I would expect it to be a top-class piece of software Tom.
I use the original FD-ISR which is my number one piece of software that I have ever had (and still have!!)
Basically you have your pc setup as you want it, and after installing First Defence Rescue you make a copy of your system. You only need to make this original copy once, it goes into a hidden place on your system and when you boot it will offer you the choice of where you want to boot to, your primary system or the copy.
So, say you try out some software, it totally wrecks your system making windows unable to boot even, you boot and before windows tries to load you are offered the choice to boot into the 'other' system.
You boot into it and do a copy from it to the broken one (takes a minute or two only) and then you boot back to your primary sytem and it's as if it all never happened.
It's a bit like system restore on steroids.
The difference between this and the original version is the original had the ability to make as many snapshots as you want and even have them on external drives.
The company has a good technical ability plus an active forum over on Wilders.
That sounds really good, Hazel. Two questions:
1) Does a "snapshot restore" in any way affect your data and/or program files -- or is the restore limited to "system items" only (apart from data and programs)?
2) What's the size of one of these "snapshots?" Does it duplicate the size of your current system drive, or is it something smaller? In other words, if I had an 80MB HD with about 45MB of free space, approximately how large would the snapshot be? The concept of this app sounds really good, but I'm a little concerned about how much space it would consume.
The size is the same as your original one. It is a one time copy. Any updates you make to it later are just copies of things that have changed. There is no compression involved but in these days of disk sizes it shouldn't be a problem.
eg (just a random example here), say I have it installed and have made the backup copy which you are asked to do at install.
Both are the same, down to the very last .dll
I decide to try avast so I uninstall avira and install avast.
I find that system is slow and after making some changings in avast config I screw things up, desktop icons won't load properly, taskmanager freezes and I keep getting the BSOD.
So I reboot and choose to boot to the secondary system which is the copy of the one before I installed avast. I then copy/update it to the primary one and then reboot into it.
I never installed avast, it was just a distant memory
All restored as it was in just a few minutes. I know other softwares can be used for testing but it is good to have one that allows you to boot directly into a working 'pc'when windows won't load.
It is sometimes a difficult software concept to understand but I love it
How do you change (delete/re-image) snapshots? See, the thing that is quite scary about the RollBack, EAZ-FIX, AyRecovery and Comodo Time Machine clones, is they always boot into "them", so to speak. If they become corrupted for some reason your PC is nuked as your MBR is now toast. I could easily live with one snapshot as I rarely have more than six or seven and usually only restore to the last one anyway. On the positive side, I agree with you hazelnut, that snapshots are the greatest thing. For the past 16 months AyRecovery and CTM have been miracle workers...but there is risk! Read what did happen to me last week on my Vista laptop:
https://forums.comodo.com/help-ctm/ctm-fina...d-t55457.0.html
The size is the same as your original one . . . but in these days of disk sizes it shouldn't be a problem.
Actually, my system drive is not that large -- only 80MB -- with about 33MB used. I'm not sure I want to commit that much of my remaining free space to a snapshot.
However, I do have a 1TB external drive. I don't suppose the snapshot can be written to an external??
slowday
I guess I have just been lucky, I have had FD-ISR for a few years now and it has never once let me down, and believe me there have been times when I have been in some very tricky situations.
Tom
I don't believe that the FirstDefence-Rescue snapshot can be written to an external, I mean how could your system boot to it if the external wasn't plugged in. Even the external snaps I have are not bootable, you copy them to a one on your machine so you can boot into them.
I don't believe that the FirstDefence-Rescue snapshot can be written to an external, I mean how could your system boot to it if the external wasn't plugged in.
That's what I thought. I was afraid of that.