Hardware Snapshot

  • Thread starter Thread starter AW
  • Start date Start date
A

AW

I was at a computer show and one of the booths offered a tiny pci
board (3" X 1") which claims to prevent virus and recovery of files by
keeping copies of changed files on a hidden partition. A boot up BIOS
option on the card allows the user to revert back to a "saved"
snapshot of the hard drive.

It was advertised as a way for schools or libraries to revert back to
a know state say after 1 week of kids or the public modifying contents
of a pc.

Anybody heard of such a device and does it really work? The cost was
relatively inexpensive at $25 US per card.

Thanks,
Art
 
Previously AW said:
I was at a computer show and one of the booths offered a tiny pci
board (3" X 1") which claims to prevent virus and recovery of files by
keeping copies of changed files on a hidden partition. A boot up BIOS
option on the card allows the user to revert back to a "saved"
snapshot of the hard drive.
Click to expand...
It was advertised as a way for schools or libraries to revert back to
a know state say after 1 week of kids or the public modifying contents
of a pc.
Click to expand...
Anybody heard of such a device and does it really work? The cost was
relatively inexpensive at $25 US per card.
Click to expand...

It may be sort of a "ghost in ROM", i.e. keeping a complete
copy of an installation and allowing you to restore it. The
think about a "saved shapshot" heavily points in that direction.

It may also try to intercept the HDD accesses, but that means
it has to mess with the OS since most modern OSes do
their own disk-access and ignore the ROM routines. In this
case the solution would be highly specific for a single OS or
set of OSes and could cause all kinds of problems and massive
slowdown.

Arno
 
The rep claimed the disk drive overhead was 5% space and yes a Windows
driver needed to be installed.

Thanks,
Art
 
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