Wilbert van Bakel - testing

Beta Corner - CTM
1

Today I decided to play with Comodo Time Machine on a clean installed Windows XP Pro system.

My first impression is actually surprisingly positive. It seems that this solution is what Eaz-Fix should have been. Although it’s too short of a time to make an assessment, I’m interested in more intense testing of this software.

First notes:

  • When I switch between snapshots, I miss a progress indication at boot time. I notice a blinking cursor, but I would like to get an indication that my system is healthy and booting.

  • I have my documents and downloads on a second partition, I would like to exclude that partition from CTM. After I switched to another snapshot I had to mount in order to access my downloads.

As beta tester of software, I’m very interested in structures like in the attached picture. I will test this configuration more in depth and report any problems.

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2

Are you saying Comodo actualy trees out as in your picure or this a a wish?

If it has this feature this would be iinteresting

3

Thanks for your input Wilbert and welcome to the forums.

We have a wishlist collecting requests from users in this board. If you would please go ahead and enter your wishes there so that they can come true :slight_smile:

again, thank you for evaluating CTM and look forward to your feedback.

thanks
Melih

4

Yes, this is my actual setup and I’m able to switch between snapshots at will.
This feature enables me to install conflicting software (like several anrivirus releases) in seperate snapshots and switch as I please to test or evaluate.

Right click on a snapshot and select ‘switch to this snapshot’, your current snapshots will remain intact.

5

Pretty cool feature, I like that. ;D

I wonder how many branches it supports. I agree that could be very useful beta testing.

6

Today I decided to convert the data partition to FAT32, to work around the CTM protection. Somehow I had the idea that protection was only available for NTFS.

So I uninstalled CTM, after first backing up my downloads and documents, then I selected to revert to the baseline. It all went without a problem and the result was just like I would expect.
Then I converted my data partition to FAT32 and reinstalled CTM.

Interestingly enough, now I do have an indication and progress bar at boot time, with the message to press the home key if I want to start the subsystem. (not tested yet)

Well, it turns out that the FAT32 file system is protected too, so I didn’t gain anything more than successful uninstall/install.

Here is some more of interest,
After I uninstalled CTM, I decided to schedule boot time chkdsk for both partitions. And then I forgot to reboot, but instead installed CTM right away. After the installation and reboot of CTM, a boot time chkdsk was performed with success: no errors.
Now, I notice that every time I switch to baseline, I get a boot time chkdsk as bonus!
It wasn’t intended that way, but I think it’s pretty neat. The baseline has now automatic boot time chkdsk build in. (until I decide to update the baseline, which is not likely)

I’m impressed, CTM seems light weight and gentle with the file system. I also mounted the partitions from a Linux live cd, and all I found was the status of the current snapshot. I do wonder where the other snapshots are stored? What would happen if I copy the files, format the partition and restore the files? Because when I access the disk offline, it seems harmless to do that.

Are the snapshots file based, or are they disk sector based? Based on my experience I prefer file based snapshots.

Again, I will build a tree of snapshots and I like to find out what happens when I delete early snapshots from these branches…

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7

The files must be disk sector based. It has been said by Comodo staff that the snapshots are stored in the empty space on the disk. I wish I could explain better. But I don’t fully understand myself.

X

8

In 2006 I was involved in reporting a bug in Eaz-Fix, deep under the hood, that was triggered in complex snapshot trees. Eaz-Fix is also sector based and I had the idea then that a file based solution would perhaps be safer.

Now wish that I had saved the bug report, I had a spreadsheet with all the steps to trigger the bug.
There were also issues with taking disk images from protected partitions.
So I wonder what happens when I run a offline defrag from bootable CD?

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