Best Program on earth

[GilbertsGrape]

today i installed the best program on earth on 3 pc's at work after i cleaned all the crap off of them, and remininesed on how much time this program has saved me by preventing me from having to clean up all the crap that normaly installed on the 40 or 50 public access PC's i take care of ....


What is theis wonder program you may ask ..... why yes .... it is "Deep Freze" when this program is installed and enabled you could format the Hard drive on one of those Pc's and turn it off and back on and it will be right back just the way i configured it .. not chat crap... mirc, no kazaa takeing up my network bandwidth .... no viruses to clean off ..... awa yes .... i love this program ... well at least untill i have to install new software on these pc and i have to go to each pc and thaw it ... reboot ... .install the software ... an freaze it back....



but the time it saves me from maintaining pc's is grand....

[jameslee]

And a link for the lazy: http://www.deepfreezeusa.com/

[jameslee]

GilbertsGrape: as a user, do you know how the program works?

[GilbertsGrape]

there is a hidden partition in the MBR and a image is stored there..... at least that is how it seams it works,,,, the only way i have been able to make it not work is to kill the MBR

[Booyamos]

hmm sounds interesting. We use a program called GoBack at my work for our labs. I think it sucks, but thats what they bought for us.. ugh.

I will have to check this out and see how it is.

[jameslee]

Roxio is suck! (For all you old school g|a users.)

The main difference seems to be that Deep Freeze automatically restores the HD after each boot, and GoBack allows you to manually perform the same operation.

GilbertsGrape, do you know how much a single Deep Freeze license costs?

[Nija]

deep freeze is used on all the computers at my school. so them damn kids don't be fux0rzing them up :)

[GilbertsGrape]

Originally posted by jameslee
Roxio is suck! (For all you old school g|a users.)

The main difference seems to be that Deep Freeze automatically restores the HD after each boot, and GoBack allows you to manually perform the same operation.

GilbertsGrape, do you know how much a single Deep Freeze license costs?

not sure how muck a single license cost ... ge got an co. wide license

[Booyamos]

Originally posted by jameslee
Roxio is suck! (For all you old school g|a users.)

The main difference seems to be that Deep Freeze automatically restores the HD after each boot, and GoBack allows you to manually perform the same operation.

GilbertsGrape, do you know how much a single Deep Freeze license costs?

Well with GoBack we have it so that it autoreverts everynight at 12:30, so they students mess up the comp during the day and then it just restores the image. Only problem is that when it gets too full it keeps popping up a warning message when you try and log on and then you can just press the cancel button to disable it. Sorta ruins the purpose of the whole thing.

I have just found the program to be annoying and it keeps messing up our systems. just looking for an alternative, and something that you can control through the net or scripts, GoBack you have to do it all manually.. ugh.

[smurphy]

This also sounds like the hardware reviewed here on got|Apex.

http://gotapex.com/reviews.php?rev=videocards/magiccard/index.html

This type of hardware or the software you mention is a god send.

Chers,
Scott Murphy

[jameslee]

Can anyone explain in layman's terms how technology like this works? I've never had a solid grasp on parity, so that might explain my confusion.

Example: The MagicCard uses less than 1% of the hard disk to store binary code used to restore the remaining 99+% of the hard disk. If you installed a utility like Norton's and trashed the majority of the hard drive using 'government-level' deletes (i.e. delete, write 0s, write 1s, write random data, etc.), how can data stored on less than 1% of the drive completely restore the drive?

[Burzhui]

we used to use a hardware thing at my old job, worked beautifully

[Joshua]

Nice find. Thanks for the post!

[smurphy]

jameslee:

Your example:
The MagicCard uses less than 1% of the hard disk to store binary code used to restore the remaining 99+% of the hard disk. If you installed a utility like Norton's and trashed the majority of the hard drive using 'government-level' deletes (i.e. delete, write 0s, write 1s, write random data, etc.), how can data stored on less than 1% of the drive completely restore the drive?

This is one of the most asked questions about the Magic Card. This product doesn't use the standard partition creation utilities and no software on the market can't see it, read it or delete it. The stored info is created using an algorithm which stores the state of the drive 0's and 1's but not the actual data itself. You can delete/format/fdisk/low-level-format to your hearts content but until you uninstall the Magic Card.

Cheers,
Scott Murphy

[jameslee]

Doh! Scott, sounds like a great explaination, but i still don't get it. I'm just dense.

Isn't the "state of the drive 0's and 1's" ultimately the actual data itself, if it can be used to restore the data? If anyone's a parity expect, a quick note on this post or link to a great guide might help.

[smurphy]

The only other analogy I can think of is this, when you fdisk an NTFS hard drive using DOS bootdisk you see a NON-DOS partition because DOS doesn't know what it is but you can still see it and delete it killing the installation of Windows.

Now if you use PowerQuest Drive Image and hide that partition, DOS will not see it and you will not be able to remove it.

The Magic Card does it a similar but it is their "magic" and no software out there (yet) can remove it because it works at the hardware level and basically ignores the software level requests to see it and remove it.

I will not be able to help much more as that is the best I can do. You can visit their website www.magiccard.ca for more information.

Cheers,
Scott Murphy

[jameslee]

Again, thanks for all the help.

Here's the deal. I understand that the partition created by the card is 'invisible' to current software utilities and therefore impossible to detect/delete.

As i understand it, this is how the card works. (I'm writing it out just to get my thoughts straight.):

. The card creates an invisible partition on the hard drive
. The partition uses less than 1% of the drive
. The partition stores binary data used to restore the remainder of the drive (99+%)
. The binary data concerns the state of the 1s and 0s on the remainder of the drive, as opposed to the actual data (e.g documents, mp3s)

My take:

. Even though the binary data on the partition isn't the actual data (e.g. files, mp3s), it is used by the card to restore all the actual data on the remainder of the drive
. So the card processes the data stored on the invisible partition regarding the 'state' of the remainder of the drive at the moment of installation, and uses it to restore the remainder of the drive to its original state
. It can do this regardless of what's happened to the remainder of the drive (with the exception of hardware failure, of course)

In summary:

. The binary data stored by the card on invisible partition, which uses less than 1% of the drive, is processed by the card to restore the remaining 99+% of the drive regardless of what's happened to the drive (with the exception of hardware failure)

Here's the rub:

. Let's say we have a 100 GB hard drive and for the sake of simplicity the invisible partition takes up 1% of the hard drive (i.e. 1 GB)
. According to the process described above, the data on the 1 GB partition can be used to recreate 99 GB of the hard drive
. Couldn't you have a 100 GB hard drive consisting only of 1 GB partitions, each one capable of recreating 99 GB of data?
. Therefore the 100 GB hard drive would be able to recreate 9,900 GB of data

Here are the considerations:

. The binary data would have to be processed twice during any file IO operation
. Once to retrieve the file from the binary data and again to store the file in the binary data
. Although you would expect this processing to take very long, the company website states that the card can be installed and the system usable in minutes (re: the storing process)
. The posts above state that the hard drive is restored in minimal time from the binary data (re: the retrieving process)

Of course, there has to be a flaw in my logic. I'd just like to know where it is.
James

[smurphy]

You must remember that you can only protect up to 8 partitions. The protection process is done once, when you select the partitions for protection. So no IO steps are done during system use as the restore process only takes place when the system is started (not OS start) and only affects the selected partitions(you can select partition restores to be done every reboot, 1/5/7 or 30 days).

Cheers,
Scott Murphy

[jameslee]

Sorry, Scott, i should have specified. I'm not talking about using the card to store 9,900 GB on a 100 GB hard drive. I'm talking theory. As in couldn't the technology implimented by the card be written into either software or a controller card to allow hard drive to store more data. Super compression, if you like.

[smurphy]

I have not seen a limit on the size of the partitions, only the number you can protect. In theory, a 1GB HD would use ~1% or 100MB. So 8 partitions of 1GB each would use ~800MB to store the drive state. There is no compression done here and you can't exact files like WinZip, that is not how the Magic Card works.

Cheers,
Scott Murphy

[jameslee]

10 MB, but who's counting? :D

[smurphy]

D'OH!

[onalamwar]

Another product similar to Deep Freeze is called Clean Slate. Might be worth checking out if you are looking into it:
http://www.fortres.com/products/cleanslate.htm