Spending a 2nd day watching lessons over at creativelive.com, managed to take a look at this in between classes, &/or while just listening when there wasn't much happening on-screen. BTW, side effects of the classes so far are finding out that everything I've read & heard about Lightroom barely -- BARELY -- scratched the surface, and next time someone compares image editing program XYZ to P/Shop, MUST bite my tongue. ;)
Quick summary... FastRestore is one of several apps available now that uses a driver to intercept requests to read from or write to a protected hard drive/partition, and re-directs those to a temporary storage area. There may be plenty of these programs available, but not so many that they start to look like clones -- features vary so if you're interested, pick out the one with features that match your needs. FastRestore lets you choose more than one drive/partition to protect, has an option to write whatever's in temporary storage to disk normally, & you don't seem to be able to start the software on-demand after Windows has started. There **may** be some provision for an added boot menu, but this is only mentioned in the readme file during install, & I didn't see any signs of it in the XP Mode VN -- I could not install normally as I've got Wondershare Time Freeze installed in XP & 7, & you can't have more than one of these apps installed. As it is the tray program kept crashing in the XP Mode VM -- that was probably because of installing to a VM, but I've no way to know for sure.
Installation adds FRKernel.sys & Protect.sys to C:\ ,which I assume is where temporary data is stored, possibly as a virtual drive or drives. Mounting the XP Mode VHD [Virtual Hard Drive or Disk] in win7, neither EaseUS nor Paragon partition apps showed any hidden partitions or anything being added to the drive for storage. That said, the FAQ warns about deleting the storage area &/or uninstalling the software any way but through the program's own uninstall. The company behind FastRestore, Xia Software, unfortunately could use someone with better translation skills -- they've got a FAQ at sysnew.com/support.html that might provide some very useful info on just how the app works, but it leaves me quite unsure of/on several points because of the language barrier.
During install a readme is presented that says:
"Read the following text carefully before installing FastRestore:1. If you install other similar software, in order to avoid compatibility issues, please uninstall it at first.
2. Scan your computer with antivirus software before installing and make sure there is no system problem on your PC.
3. Strongly recommend that you do defragmentation on the system disk before installing.
4. Installation of FastRestore on a GPT disk with UEFI-based motherboard results in automatically restore for each booting. And there will be no boot screen or hotkey available.
5. Install FastRestore, Windows System Restore may be automatically disabled, please be sure to back up important data before the restoration.
6. Install FastRestore should avoid doing defragmentation on protected partition(s).
7. The TRIM of SSD is not compatible with FastRestore, TRIM will be disabled.
8. Please do not install this program on a dual-boot system"
As above there are several virtualization programs out now -- some maintain the virtual state after reboot, while others revert to the base state every time your PC/laptop (re)starts. The advantage is that you're pretty well protected *unless* mal-ware can get access to unprotected storage, including the 1st, hidden hard drive track where some rootkits like to live -- not all mal-ware will seek out additional storage, or PCs/laptops via your network, or USB devices, or things like your router, but some will, so that's something to bear in mind. One disadvantage is that you're adding another layer to Windows, since every new read/write has to go through the process of being redirected, and that costs added time -- not a lot, but enough that you wouldn't necessarily want to run it encoding video or playing a demanding game. Another disadvantage is that you have to leave yourself an out, so you can write to the drive(s) normally to save something or when you add software or when you add updates.
Personally I've not found any sort of ideal virtualization software, checking out any of these apps that I've come across. I like being able to turn Time Freeze On/Off, & being able to start it whenever I want, but the temporary storage can fill up, making Windows useless until you reboot or write everything permanently to disk. Because it resets after a re-boot, it's not possible to install anything that requires a re-boot when it's running. The way I use it is as a temporary measure when/if I want to monitor an install in my regular Windows OS, & then only after I've monitored the install & 1st run in one of my VMs. I Don't rely on it to protect anything while browsing on-line, nor do I use it to feel safe when running software I've no reason to trust.
The reality is I've not set up some sort of lab arrangement like the folks at Kaspersky, so the rest of our network & the router are potentially vulnerable to some of the nasty stuff out there in the wild -- not having anything written permanently to disk means nothing if mal-ware running in that temporary storage infects one of our PCs or the router.