Deep Freeze Mac 2.0 with ARD – Intelligent Utilities for Absolute Control

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Deep Freeze Mac 2.0 with ARD by Faronics freezes configuration-modes for any Mac OS X-based system. Actually, with Deep Freeze enabled, the practice of turning off a machine will insure that any file manipulation on that system will have completely, inalterably have disappeared into the ether since Deep Freeze was enabled. In my mind, this is both its strength and its Achilles heel.

In order to have any files or documents saved so that the Deep Freeze function is not an issue after it is enabled, is to have a file-saving function offloaded to an external drive of location – that would include any Email activity. I know, because even though I had not logged in as the Deep Freeze admin, the app most certainly worked as advertised. If a system is never shut off (Unix – and therefore Mac OS X - was designed for systems that are always on), it will not have any problems.

I have a habit of turning of my system when not in use, so I didn’t realize that after I installed the app to my machine, it began doing its thing immediately, even though I had not gone as far as to set up an account yet. I found it rather peculiar that files and folders that I had sent to the trash kept reappearing and recent Emails and attachments were nowhere to be found as I was finishing up the issue of macCompanion for last month.  I had to put Deep Freeze into Thaw-mode because Freeze mode is the default. Otherwise, all my work would be considered to be temporary and would disappear on reboot.

Of course, if I had a mirror site or were automatically saving all changes to an external drive instead of just one folder, I would have been blissfully ignorant that this app was in complete control of my machine. Except that I had requested to review it because it has an interoperability function for use with the Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/ for another $300 USD (10 clients) or higher.

There is no Preferences link to get to Deep Freeze after it is installed. The only way you know it is on your machine, besides turning it off and wondering why everything that was done had become undone, is to look in the toolbar at the top of the screen and see the polar bear icon as either blue (frozen) or red (thawed).  The User Guide is all of 18 pages in length.

Now why on this green earth would you even consider using this app? Only if you were having difficulties with either employee or government or training environment (library, student) systems or that needed to be reset either locally or remotely after a session was completed. Those using the systems would have to know that they could only save their work by offloading files to CD, thumb-drive, network drive or an Internet storage location. This app is strictly for the ease-of-use by the system administrators and not for the convenience of the end-users.

Configurations can be saved and either imported or exported and after login, settings can be changed to either frozen or thawed, drives and users can be added or removed and this is the only place where the uninstall can been easily accessed via the Deep Freeze X Control panel shown here.

If you work in an environment that has partitioned drives, than a non-Deep Freezed partition would be a great place to save session changes.

There are server, professional and enterprise versions with the non-Mac environment specifically addressed.

Faronics • 800-943-6422 • www.faronics.com

Deep Freeze has been localized in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Japanese.

Remember that at least 10 licenses need to be purchased, so if you use anything less, there are other solutions available. This is an enterprise-level app that does its job well.