Hey guys. Great job from all of the responders here, love the way everyone seems to help out here.
I was just wondering: Would it be possible for someone to make an altered .ini file that would allow avast to run the VRDB like once a week and send it to me, or, post it on a file sharing host?
The reason is, I have made a couple of vids about avast and posted them on YouTube and have got some really positive feedback–have converted a few AVG’ers along the way.
But everyone seems to agree that the VRDB should run just a bit more frequently. The user interface says “Once every three weeks” and that seems to be quite a stretch in between snapshots; a lot can happen in three weeks.
I am not a pc power user and my vids are geared more towards novice/intermediate users such as myself…none of us would be able to alter the .ini files ourselves I don’t think.
This is just a though/simple request and if anyone thinks they could help us out with this you would make a lot of people very happy and would, of course, get fully credit for the work on the video and file link.
I’m just trying to help others the way you guys do but my abilities are extremely limited.
I would suggest that you leave the VRDB settings as they are, once you have run it for the first time, set it to either Generate VRDB when ‘computer is idle’ or when ‘screen-saver is running’ that way it will run automatically every three weeks (21 days).
The reason to leave the default delay is if there is too short a period between generations, the VRDB keeps three generations (copies), then there would only be two weeks between your proposed weekly generations (gen1 - week - gen2 - week - gen3).
This means if there was an undetected virus on your system when it is eventually detected if a repair is possible, it may be that all three generations of the VRDB were on infected files, so a repair wouldn’t work. So on the default 3 week interval the spread is 6 weeks, this is likely to have a better chance of success if a repair is attempted.
The VRDB isn’t a back-up it doesn’t keep copies of files but information on the file to be able to attempt to put it back as it was pre infection.
The VRDB only protects certain files, mainly .exe files, it doesn’t protect data files or all files, it is not a back-up program, so there are going to be many occasions where repair won’t be an option.
Only true virus infection can be repaired, e.g. when a virus infects a file it adds a small part to it, provided that file is one that avast’s VRDB would monitor and you have run the VRDB, then it may be possible to repair the file to its uninfected state.
However, for the most part so called viruses, trojans (adware/spyware/malware, etc.) can’t be repaired because the complete content of the file is malicious.