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First Defense-ISR 2.1
Roll back from OS mishaps in a snap.
by Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest

Posted June 10, 2004

By juxtaposing the words Immediate, System, and Recovery in the product name of Raxco Software's new First Defense-ISR (FD-ISR), the company sets a high expectation for system administrators. Does FD-ISR really deliver immediate system recovery, as its name promises? Under the right circumstances, the answer is yes.

Large and small IT shops struggle with system recovery constantly. Some use backups for system protection. Others use third-party software such as disk imaging tools to protect their entire system. Still others use a combination of both along with additional methods supported by the operating system.

Microsoft has come a long way in simplifying system restoration for both users and IT shops. Windows XP, for example, now includes the ability to create System Restore Points, which automatically capture the running state of a system before any major change. If anything goes wrong after the change, you can simply use the System Restore tool to revert to a previous restore point. Both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 also include Automated System Recovery, a tool that creates a bootable floppy disk that can be used to directly connect to your backup device to restore a nonworking system. Although these tools simplify the restoration of a server or a workstation, they still require time to perform the restoration.

That's where FD-ISR comes in. It is designed to capture snapshots of the operating system—but not the data a system holds—and allow you to boot to a previous snapshot in the event of a mishap. That means it will save an image of your operating system automatically and store it in a secure location on your hard disk. You have the option of booting to the FD-ISR boot screen from which you can select a snapshot to boot into. When you do so, it launches your system with the information stored in the snapshot.

Several technologies work together to make FD-ISR work. The first is the snapshot capability. This begins when you install FD-ISR, since it considers the state of the operating system at installation as the first snapshot. Once installed, you use the Getting Started Wizard to create an additional snapshot. By default, this is called the second snapshot. Just follow the instructions (see Figure 1). This snapshot is a duplicate of your operating system (OS); therefore, if your OS takes up 2 GB on your disk, the snapshot will take up 2 GB as well.

Second, FD-ISR can take snapshots of the operating system while it is running because it includes a special open file manager that will automatically take a copy of files even if they are open. Without this capability, FD-ISR would only create partial copies of the OS—copies that would be less than useful.