The question comes up quite a bit when people are looking at our restore on reboot software Drive Vaccine, or its freeware little brother Reboot Restore Rx – do these programs work with the cloud?
The answer is simply and unequivocally yes.
There it is. If you wanted to know the short answer, well, there you have it.
But simply stating that fact isn’t fun enough for us, so if you aren’t satisfied yet and want to know exactly why cloud-based applications such as DropBox and Google Drive don’t just work, but work very well with our software, then keep reading.
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Still here? Great. Let’s get into it.
The Cloud VS the Local Drive
All of our software works in some way shape or form by taking a “snapshot” of the entire system (data included) which is stored on the sector-level of the drive. This is the sub-space below the Windows file level which works with all the 0’s and 1’s known as binary, or sometimes referred to as machine language.
Whether you’re dealing with Reboot Restore Rx, Drive Vaccine, or the PC time machine RollBack Rx, each of these programs are built on the same foundation. You can visually get a sense of this by installing each program and upon restarting the machine you will see the corresponding splash screen/logo, which allows the user a quick few seconds to access the subsystem of the program. Take a look at the subsystem – don’t each of these programs look alike?
That’s because they are.
Now, knowing this, you can come to understand Reboot Restore Rx, Drive Vaccine, and RollBack Rx either “freeze” or “snapshot” the system in their own way. With the former, the software is taking a snapshot of the drive and on every reboot is automatically restoring the snapshot. This works the same way with Drive Vaccine, except Drive Vaccine has a couple more snapshots available (the LGK and Installation state). RollBack Rx can essentially be thought of as an “unlimited” version of these two programs without a built-in auto-restore function. While its brethren are working with up to a few snapshots, RollBack Rx is free to take as many as the drive can handle, and will only recall those snapshots on specific parameters the end user creates.
All of these “snapshots” are stored locally on the sector-level of the drive. The reason the programs do this is so when a user makes a mistake or gets a PC infection such as a virus, malware, or ransomware, then these viruses are not able to locate and infect another snapshot. This allows the user to load into any snapshot on the system at their leisure, undoing any problems created in another snapshot state.
Let me reiterate – all of these “snapshots” from Reboot Restore Rx, Drive Vaccine, and RollBack Rx, are all stored on the local drive. They cannot be moved off the local drive or stored on another partition unless the user uses our imaging software Drive Cloner Rx to backup the system and its snapshots.
This is where the cloud comes in handy.
With Google Drive, Dropbox, or any of the many cloud-based solutions out there “syncing data into the cloud” boils down to simply uploading and storing those files onto an external drive, which is usually on those companies’ servers. The beauty of the cloud is as long as the user has an Internet connection and proper login credentials, they can open and view their files from several devices such as a smartphone, tablet, or PC, and share that data with other users. This is great for all kinds of users, as important data can be stored offsite in case of hardware failure.
Do you see where we’re going with this yet?
Our software is all about the local drive. The cloud is the opposite, and focuses on everything off the local drive. In fact, pairing these two types of software is the perfect match.
Covering all angles
Reboot Restore Rx, Drive Vaccine, and RollBack Rx all take care of the local drive and its contents in their own ways. But not all problems can be managed by a single solution, and in case of a hardware failure for instance offsite backups are necessary to ensure important data is available and safe.
The cloud offers this ability, and our software does not interfere with these programs and their capabilities.