VitalFile for Real-Time Workstation Protection provides transparent real-time file-level protection. Any time a “user-created” file is changed; VitalFile makes up to three copies. No administrator is necessary and users can restore files themselves.
Get Real-Time Workstation protection
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Is it free (as in free beer) for personal use? I couldn’t find any info on that on IBM’s sites…
this is interesting. i take it that one can set the number of revisions one wants to keep. kinda like system restore but on a pr file basis
i wonder, are all the files deleted when the original is deleted?
Now this is the kind of feature I’d like to see in future OSes. Now that disks are so huge, it would be nice to have the option to keep multiple versions of files.
The documentation mentioned that the software wont work with Symantec firewall installed – I have ZoneAlarm Pro installed, and in spite of giving it full permissions, and even shutting down the firewall altogether, it just didn’t work. Anyone else had better luck with it?
@Wes Felter
Now this is the kind of feature I’d like to see in future OSes.
VMS has had this feature since the dawn of time. Create a file ‘foo.txt’ and it is stored on the disk as ‘foo.txt;1’. Edit it and the edited copy is saved as ‘foo.txt;2’ but the original one remains. The ‘purge’ command could be used to delete all the older copies so only the most recent update remained. It was a nice feature.
Eugenia, where are you ? Are you slipping at the switch ? Aren’t you supposed to delete offensive comments like those made by Darius ? Just kidding 🙂
This “protection” will only waste resources. They bring to us one more backup program, and say – It can protect you!
What kind of protection can be achieved on file level, while lots of ntoskrnl functions are still available to hacker? How will this protection work under stress conditions? Realtime protection should protect my processes!
When I write a very important document, I must be sure that no one can patch IN MEMORY. If not, why should I save 3 copies of corrupted file?
This “protection” will only waste resources. They bring to us one more backup program, and say – It can protect you!
Spoken by someone who obviously hasn’t spent time restoring files from tape because the current version of a file got corrupted.
As someone mentioned, this isn’t new, VMS did the same thing. Ideally, you’d never delete the old files, you’d just keep old versions until you ran out of space on the disk, and delete the oldest files as space was needed. Much like a LRU cache.
NTFS supports file versioning as well (known as NTFS streams). Unfortunately, the Win32 subsystem doesn’t provide an interface to it. Check the following link for more details:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml#streams
…avast antivir provides similar service (file change protection up to 3 steps file version backtracking) even in the free home version for a long time – using it with satisfaction un multiple machines for quite a while now