There are more development teams not all work on CIS…
Is there a special team only for CTM?
Thank you for the update Razvan! Any new features added? We’d love a CTM 3.0 featurelog, even if it’s not a final one!
THANKS!
Thank you for the heads up Razvan. You give us something to look forward to… :■■■■
Thanks Razvan, i really hope the beta is released sometime in september
Thanks Razvan, i really hope the beta is released when it is sufficiently stable and feature rich warrant beta testing.
Ewen 
Fantastic News in the meantime I will continue testing 2.8 and 2.9 cant wait for 3.00 getting quite excited
edit: fixed quote structure, wasgij6
I’m glad to confirm that the upcoming beta will not be ‘barebones’, it will have all the major features of the final release, (including of course full TRIM support). It will also support CTM updates without losing the old snapshots.
GREAT NEWS!
A big thanks to everyone involved with CTM development, and also to Melih for keeping it alive!
For Win7, there really is no alternative to CTM. SteadyState for Windows was pulled after Vista. It’s very hard to recreate the security of CTM restores using policies and awkward sandbox techniques. So, yes, please continue with CTM! Maybe start charging for it? Your prices are fair and you’d get an idea of the real need for this product.
There is more than one actually, the most ‘mainstream’ one being Rollback RX and its sister product EAZ-FIX (which is identical to RX). They also fully support SSDs and TRIM but they are commercial programs. Snce I started using SSDs on my systems I was forced to abandon CTM 2.8 and switch to RX, and it works really well with both x32 and x64 Win7. I just hope that the new CTM 3.0 will be good so I can at last switch back to it.
Another one that has creeped up recently is SysRestore; but its implementation is different to the aforementioned products and it doesn’t support free switching between snapshots like CTM or RX/EAZ-FIX. With SysRestore if you restore an older snapshot then all snapshots that were created after that one will be gone. Not good.
AFAIK no decent free alternatives to CTM. CTM is unique and deserves steady development. It’s the best ad for COMODO to release new versions of CTM.
Thanks very much for these references that I’d missed. Very useful feedback.
As for use, it looks like SysRestore might fit the bill, but maybe CTM? What’s the advise here?
Application is a small school in France that teaches French to folks who come from China, Japan, Mid East, other Europe, and US. Many use the lobby computers to set up their own languages and use for VOIP or mail to their countries while students. About 6 Win 7 and 2 XP machines.
You can’t imagine after a month the state of these machines !
So I go around and clean and restore as a volunteer. And dream of a way to make a snapshot at that point that would endure and be fired off each time the computer booted in the AM or when shut down in the PM.
Any tips on how CTM could be made to do that (or SysRestore) would be a great help.
Merci par avance.
Carls
Carl I sent you a PM with suggestions
Actually the lack of preservation of newer snapshots could be seen as a benefit rather than a drawback for the sort of use that Carl2 (and I) want to use it for - when restoring to an older snapshot using this type of software one of the (main) reasons for us is to remove any user files to preserve data/identity security.
I still wouldn’t trust to install such a new program on mission-critical PCs. It does have bugs, and if your computers start blue-screening you’ll suffer some serious downtime. Shadow Defender in my view would be the best for your purposes and Marks’. Shadow Defender is not snapshot-based, it just puts the whole system into a protected Shadow Mode. When in Shadow Mode all changes are undone with a simple reboot and the protected disk is reverted to the exact state it was when Shadow Mode was activated.
Users can choose which disks or partitions to put into Shadow Mode, you can protect only the Windows partition/disk if you want, or choose to protect any other disk connected to the system. Users can also commit the changes to the real system if they choose to do so; but if users want to commit changes they have to open the program itself and manually choose for the changes to be commited. The program by default commits nothing, it discards all changes upon reboot (which is safer).
The best thing about Shadow Defender is that it is THE ONLY PROGRAM that can withstand and fully undo infections by sophisticated malware (things like the TDSS rootkit family for example). No other program can undo such infections. When a malware hits you just reboot, and the malware will be gone, the infection completely undone like it never happened. In fact, anything that can a user add to the computer, any setting they change, everything will be reverted back to the state it was when Shadow Mode was activated. I use it for almost 3 years now and I even tested it with some serious malware - and it has managed to fully undo ALL infections. I now install it on all my clients’ PCs as standard and it saves me from a lot of future troubleshooting.
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Where did you get this from?
Any link or video to share?
Have both TimeFreezes (Wondershare and Toolwiz) been tested against that malware?
Light virtualization aficionados have been testing all these programs for ages now, and the generally accepted consensus is that Shadow Defender is still the only one to withstand and fully undo sophisticated infections like TDSS. If you are new to this thing then there’s nothing that I can say right now that will convice you. I was the same myself, and it took me a lot of personal testing to come to the same conclusions that the more experienced users were telling me. If you are to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of light virtualization you’ll know what I mean. A good place to start is here:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=98
Most light virtualization apps work at a file system level. With some of those programs you can actually see the buffer as a file itself. Shadow Defender works at sector level. The virtualization buffer resides on a hidden partition which uses its own proprietary file system and is totally invisible to the system and to any malware. In fact you can’t even see it with specialized software like partition managers. Other virtualizers also use a hidden partition for their buffer but none is as effective as Shadow Defender’s.
Some people have claimed that Shadow Defender has been bypassed by certain malware but such tests were always carried out in a VM environment and in my opinion such tests are useless. No such conclusions can be taken seriously, unless the tests take place on a real system, not within a virtual machine. I have personally tested it repeatedly on a real system with a wide variety of viruses, trojans, ransomware, fake antiviruses and TDSS/TDL rootkits and it has always managed to fully undo the infections. In the case of TDSS/TDL it was able to remove not only the rootkit itself, but also the rootkit’s file system (some other virtualizers have succesfully removed the rootkit but the rootkit’s file system was left behind).
The only problem with Shadow Defender is that it doesn’t work well on SSDs. Also, most seasoned users still use the last known good version 1.1.0.325. The program’s developer Tony abandoned the project two years ago and it is testament to his coding skills that his two-year old version is still able to withstand and undo sophisticated rootkit infections. Since then a new version has appeared at the SD website (v1.1.0.331) but most Shadow Defender old timers like myself don’t trust it because it was released without a changelog by the current owners of the website who offered no support.
It now looks like Tony is back after some personal problems (so we were told) and we were recently promised a new upcoming version that will be fully compatible with SSDs and Win8. I don’t know if this new Tony is the original Tony, or if it is a ploy by the current owners of Shadow Defender to cash in on Tony’s rootkit-killing fame. The future will show. All I know is that the good old v225 is still keeping at bay everything I ever threw at it, and that’s good enough for me. I have been using v1.1.0.325 since it came out and still use it on all my systems and those of my clients. For more info on the whole Tony/Shadow Defender saga have a look here:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=293075&page=55
Toolwiz TF is a promising new light virtualization app. I have been exchanging ideas with the Toolwiz developers since the program started and they have already implemented some of my suggestions on recent versions. My aim is to try and help them make Toolwiz TF as sturdy as Shadow Defender when it comes to resistance to rootkits. The fact that Toowiz TF works on a file system level goes against such a goal, but those Toolwiz guys are young and hungry so it is not impossible. Another idea I submitted to Toolwiz back in January this year was for the program to be able to use RAM for its virtualization buffer. Most modern systems have a lot of RAM, and using it for the buffer would make virtualization much faster. It would also save SSD owners from a lot of unnecessary hits. Toolwiz is still working on this one and hopefully it will be implemented soon.
Wondershare TF is old news in my view. Version 2.0.3 is now more than two years old and it doesn’t look like it will be updated any time soon. This program includes the option of a RAM buffer but its implementation is very buggy, at least on three of my own systems where I tested it. I suspect that Wondershare lacks people with the coding talent to take the program any further, so they will keep on flogging their old version for as long as they can. My encounter with their customer services in the past wasn’t encouraging either. I contacted them two years ago to let them know of a bug in the program’s interface and they did nothing about it. When users choose a 125% size font for Windows then most of the TF program is not visible, including the slider to turn on virtualization (look at attached screenshots - the third one is as the program should look like. The second one is what it looks like with 125% font size). This makes the program impossible to use for people with poor eyesight who will use a larger font than the default 100% size. I have discovered a workaround but it makes the whole display fuzzy so it’s no good. They still haven’t bothered to fix this, a full two years since I first told them about it.
None of those programs offer any serious resistance to sophisticated malware by the way, and that includes Returnil, Faronics Deep Freeze and all the other contenters. Shadow Defender v1.1.0.325 is still the one to beat.
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i agree, i used SD v.326 , and it never get bypassed yet by any malwares i launch into it.
If you use it alongside Rollback RX and your AV (CIS for example) the chances you have to be infected (and got your system k.o) is very very small.
I use RX and SD together on systems with SSDs and they work great together. RX is a lifesaver for software testing, and SD is my safety net against malware that RX alone would not be able to withstand. BTW, when SD is used with RX it can be used on SSDs without problems. I’m really looking forward to test SD with the latest CTM 3.0.