15-Minute Reviews :: Returnil Virtual System v1.6.2.4117

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Returnil Virtual System version by Returnil – An application to provide you with a virtual layer for protecting your primary drive while on.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Returnil Virtual System is a powerful technology that clones a copy of your System Partition in memory and can create a file based Virtual Partition where you can save documents, data, and files while using the System Protection feature. Returnil Virtual System protects your computer from harmful viruses, Spyware and unwanted programs, preserves your computer settings, and ensures your Internet Privacy. Simply restart your computer to erase all changes.”

Quick Pros

• Adds a protection layer over entire system drive while enabled
• Offers the chance for a virtual drive for saving of critical files
• Does as states intended – Survived delete rampage

Quick Cons

• Could be a little easier to switch on or off system protection
• Requires a reboot to disable
• Only protects one drive (System drive)
• Not compatible with RAID
• Question how it stores changes

Expansion

This application is a bit interesting in that it provides an entire protection layer across your system drive. While there are other virtualization-for-security products out there, this seems to be unique in that it essentially protects the entire drive rather than running an application in its own mini-system.

Messing around quite a bit with the application, I found that the application does protect the system drive pretty well. Delete files/uninstall/etc – They all pop right back upon reboot when I had system protection on. The application’s author encourages that everyone can run in protected mode almost full-time except for Windows Updates and other critical system file setup; This may be a bit more complex than originally thought – Many programs need access to the registry during installation without wiping on reboot; Quite a few require there be additional or up-to-date system files; As well, uninstall information will be lost from the Add/Remove Programs section, when you reboot. It just means that you will still need to disable and re-enable system protection from time to time for various chores.

The application offers you a way to save files, even when in system protection mode. With the virtual drive functionality, you can create a virtual partition and have it mounted; This partition will not wipe even when you have system protection on; It allows you to save your files you’re working on, such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and everything else you can save. The virtual partition should also be less succeptible to common partition-eating viruses as well due to the fact that it is not a real partition, but a partition mounted on your computer from the system drive.

After a bit of messing around and deleting what I can, uninstalling everything I can and attempting to delete files (Which I can’t manage to manually delete folders manually in Program Files, Windows or otherwise – Another level of protection?) And after repeated reboots, it all springs back. I wasn’t brave enough (Or enough time in the scope of this review) to find a rootkit or virus to try that, I am sure MOST would likely end up being wiped out by a reboot; The biggest concern is that a virus could theoretically infect files that are on your virtual drive or other non-system drives and get you when you come out of system protection mode. All-in-all it appears to do the job that it is intended to do.

There are a few concerns I do have. First off, they could have made the process a little easier. Especially since installing applications can be a bit of a pain unless you plan on running from all portable applications on the virtual partition, you will sooner or later need to disable the application. It is 4 clicks to turn on or off system protection (into the main window) – Would have been more convienient to have a click-popup on the system tray or better yet the little box that shows up at the top of the screen. As well, while a lot of people could stay in this mode indefinitely, some may prefer to flip to and from it often (Development or otherwise). Requiring a reboot for every disabling makes this application will make this less than appealing for some. Onto this, it does only protect your primary system drive; It may have been interesting to have seen an ‘application install’ function that would unlock a second partition as well as the registry and system folders and keep a copy temporarily in case something went wrong.

One major concern I had with this application is how it actually works – The author of the application does not clearly state and seems to contradict themselves a bit in the FAQs on their site. – While the FAQs mostly state that it keeps a copy of the system drive in memory, we all know this is not the case – Hard drives would be far too massive to shove in memory. So it must be assumed that changes are saved to memory; However, after downloading well over 600MB (EVE-Online plus a small army of other files, installers and so forth) as well as installing applications, copying files and so on with my latest test, there is barely a small budge in memory usage. That said, there is hard drive access while this is all going on, so it must be assumed that most of the transactions are still occuring on the drive, if not all. While there are mixed-message statements on the FAQs on how things are done, I believe this is not describing the method well at all. After all of this messing around on my test system this time (And I have done a lot) the RVsystem.exe application has only increased under 100k from 4.5MB to 4.6MB and my system memory as a whole is also almost identical to when I started. I feel the author of the application needs to publish the exact process so that its users can know how they are truly protected.

Final Verdict

All-in-all, it is a great concept if you need a full-blown lockdown of your system when testing something. The author could stand to expand the explanation of how the application works and clarify/review their current FAQ to reduce confusion, increase awareness and help the community grow to protect against malware. That said, this is not a replacement for anti-virus/anti-spyware software; In my opinion it should be another tool used in conjunction with these other tools because eventually you will need to turn off system proection to do updates, install software or otherwise. While free, it isn’t a bad package to give a try – If you either only occasionally need to tinker in something potentially hazardous, or you plan on using it almost full-time. As for paying $24.95, I likely would steer around this application, though I must admit, reviewing the author’s site, this $24.95 is for the business version. There is a free personal version available on their website that is almost identical to this application (It is only missing RVSMOVER is all I can find as differences.) For free, it may be handy to have around for those special situations.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, July 09, 2007