I got these comments which were quite helpful explaining the nuances compare with programs like Returnil from
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/sandboxie-personal-license/"# Cyndi Queen Says:
How does Sandboxie differ from Power Shadow. With Power Shadow, if you put the computer into "shadow mode," you can go to dangerous websites or install questionable software to try out, and as soon as you reboot the computer, all traces are gone. The one bad thing is that if you want to know how a piece of software will affect the boot process or whether it will slow down the computer after you've rebooted, you can't tell with Power Shadow. Is that true as well of Sandboxie? Does Sandboxie offer advantages over Power Shadow?
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Jan 15 2009 11:44am
Website Visitor Jay G. Says:
Cyndi, PowerShadow is like Faronics Deep Freeze or Returnil where the entire system drive is "virtualized" or sandboxed, meaning while they're on, all the changes to the system drive are virtualized and erased on reboot. Not only can't you install software that requires a reboot, updating a program typically requires rebooting the PC, having the sandboxer off, then running the update. Likewise, personal documents have to be saved to something other than the system drive/partition before a reboot, or they'll be lost forever.
With Sandboxie, only the programs that you run inside it are sandboxed, meaning that you can run the majority of your programs unsandboxed, and only run potentially vunerable programs (web browsers) or questionable programs inside the sandbox. So you can update Windows and your AV program running outside Sandboxie, make and save documents, but run your web browser within Sandboxie so that any potential malware that it is attacked by is stuck inside the sandbox.
Resetting in Sandboxie is different too, since to clear out a sandbox you usually just have to close all the programs running inside of it and then "delete contents." Everything inside the sandbox is erased, no reboot required.
Sandboxie also allows you to "recover" files that are sandboxed. So say you download a file in your sandboxed web browser, Sandboxie will give you the option of copying the file out of the sandbox.
Sandbox contents also stay there until manual erasure, even after a reboot. This can be a good thing, as you can test software over a period of time within the sandbox. However, since the erasure isn't automatic, if a piece of malware infects the sandbox, it stays in there until you remember to clear the sandbox, making protection a bit less "automatic" than hard drive virtualizers like Power Shadow.
Sandboxie doesn't support driver installs, so any program that installs a driver can't be installed withing Sandboxie, while they may be able to be installed with a hard drive virtualizer activated.
There is a freeware version of Sandboxie available on the publishers site if you want to try it out.
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Jan 15 2009 12:20pm
Website Visitor Jay G. Says:
Some additional notes:
Since with Sandboxie you're going to be running a mix of sandboxed and non-sandboxed programs at once, Sandboxie adds [#] brackets to the titles of windows running sandboxed. For example, a sandboxed Firefox will show at the top of it's window the title: [#] Mozilla Firefox [#] .
Also, you have to explicitly run programs within Sandboxie in order for them to be sandboxed. To do this, you either start them from within Sandboxie Control, or right-click on the program and select "run sandboxed". Programs installed inside Sandboxie can only be run sandboxed. The personal license offered here allows you to force certain programs to always run sandboxed, even if you don't do the steps above and try to run it like normal.
Finally, you can create multiple sandboxes in Sandboxie and run different applications in each. For example, you can run your web browser in one, then install a program into its own sandbox. That way you can erase one sandbox without affecting the program in the other sandbox. The freeware version limits you to only using one sandbox at a time, but the personal license lets you use as multiple sandboxes at once."
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/sandboxie-personal-license/