These are just two important reasons why it is always a good idea to protect important files from ever being deleted. To truly secure files it is not enough to use encryption because in this case files are still prone to deletion, but rather file protection software which would lock and protect important system files permanently. In this case free System Protect is a tool of choice.
System Protect is free file protection software designed specifically to protect important system files from deletion, whether it be from accident or from malware attack. Further it offers full control over all other files you want to protect by going to custom protection panel and adding files to be protected.
System Protects works in three different modes and choosing the right mode depends on your preferences of whether you want to be fully protected with/without interruptions (Deny mode) or whether you want to decide by your own which suspected file will be or not deleted (Ask mode).
Files protected with this program are now secured and won't be deleted unless program itself is shutdown. And this is where we come to its major drawback. Although effective at protecting files from being deleted, it proved to be easily shut down from task manager in which case important files are no longer protected. This is important from security perspective as there are many malware outside designed to shutdown computer security to successfully penetrate system and because of that every security application these days has to be immune to being shutdown by force. I believe program's author decided not to make it work on low level kernel purposely to not compromise system stability and this is why System Protect is vulnerable to termination.
Apart all that, SP is very useful free application I personally recommend.
Although being a sort of anti malware protection tool to protect computer keep in mind that this application is not substitute for a decent antivirus program nor is a malware remover. It simly protects files from deletion.
10 Comments:
I happened to find virtual system & sandbox apps such as Returnil & Shaadow defender a better choice of extra protection, though. Don't get me wrong, it's not that System Protect is bad, but on OS like Vista & 7, it's almost unlikely for most malware to simply terminate system files just like that due to the restrictive administrative priviledges & UAC protection (if we didn't turn it off in the first place, anyway).
Speaking of Returnil, have you consider covering the beta version of Returnil 2010 on your site? I heard that Returnil plans to undergo extensive beta-testing & is actively calling for more testers.
@Be James
I like your smart well-thought comments. However many people run Vista without UAC, me as well in which case they do not have such protection. But I was actually targeting more to protecting personal files from deletion than protecting system files.
Virtualization and sandboxing(sort of virtualization) is one of the best protection one can get. I am ok with sandboxing but I never liked the idea of full virtualization such as Returnil. Simply because using Returnil means you are actually running two operating system at once. A host which holds environment for guest system and virtualized environment as well. This means you need almost twice the system resources which in Vista translates to dual core cpu and more than 2GB of memory, which is for a lot of people far from reality. And performance hit is also tremendous which makes it unacceptable for me once more.
But I support products such as Sandboxie, SafeSpace, DefenseWall and GesWall.
I will try to take a look at Returnil and see how it performs.
This application should be on all computers for 2 things:
+ Prevent accidental deletion
+ Prevent deletion from malwares.
@Be James
I forgot to mention. Returnil and Shadow Defender are both shareware. If you like virtualization, I suggest you to try Windows SteadyState which is free and similarly effective. You can get it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/install/default.mspx
@Phaoloo
Exactly!
Nice blog about protecting data. But that image seem to be even more interesting.
Very useful
yeah.. it's really important to have something that can protect our data, i lost my work couple of times.. almost gone nuts !
well...I bad experience for a lost a data,be safe if we are have something to protect it!
Great info, I've definitely suffered through some of these issues before and it's nice to know that there is a program out there to help with this.
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