Inventor compatibility with Faronics Deep Freeze

[gdwhitfield]

We have Inventor 2015 to deploy to machines that will be frozen with Faronics Deep Freeze and need configuration help to utilize network folders instead of local hard drives.

[JDMather]

I am not sure I understand the question.

I work in a school environment where we use Deep Freeze.

Set everything up the way you want it in your image before ghosting hard drives.

Are you using Projects or are you using Vault?

[gdwhitfield]

Actually, as I'm not a user of the software I wouldn't know Projects or Vault if they bit me. I installed Inventor 2015 64-bit and there's a lot in that install. However, I do see that the default folder locations for everything are on the local hard drive and don't appear to want to change easily. Since our user profiles are wiped by a restart of the machine (Deep Freeze) I'm worried about students losing work. Can you give me a quick idea of whether you have a similar setup and it's working okay or do we need to do this another way? Deep Freeze isn't going away, I know that much.

[JDMather · Accepted solution]

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@gdwhitfield wrote:
.... wiped by a restart of the machine (Deep Freeze) I'm worried about students losing work.

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We use Deep Freeze the same way.

Students should not be saving their work to the local C:\drive, the should be saving to their network drive or to removable media.

They can each set up personal *.ipj Projects (on their drive) to automate the process (less likely to forget).

They should be instructed to generate Content Center parts as Custom (local, saved in their Project).

Actually, we have a small Deep Freeze "Thawspace" partition on the local HDDs as well, that isn't wiped by Deep Freeze.
If we are having trouble with the network - we generally work from Thawspace and then copy files to removable media when finished.

Deep Freeze has worked very well for us in school environment.

In fact, every time I get a new personal computer - I keep saying I should get Deep Freeze to keep it clean.  (but I don't, then kick myself when I somehow download something I should not have touched)

[gdwhitfield]

Your feedback gives me some hope that I won't have much to worry about. We're commited Deep Freeze users, we've frozen every student and faculty machine that we could get away with in 10+ schools for the last 10 years without any real problems but somehow AutoDesk seems to have come close to threatening that policy. Last year I was told by the reseller's support that we CAN'T use Deep Freeze if we want to use AutoDesk so we didn't freeze the student machines in that one lab. We decided our support policy for those machines was to re-image if anything at all happened. Seems we made it through the year okay though but it set up some anxiety for this year.

Anyway, thank you for the help! I'll probably have more questions for you in time (if you don't mind) but I'm moving ahead with frozen installs and we'll see how it goes. BTW - you mention Ghost (which we used to use, along with Zen), do you do imaging with that? Just curious, no reply necessary I'm not trying to be nosy but we've been using a free substitute called FOG (Free Open-Source Ghost) for years that is just as awesome for its purpose as Deep Freeze is.

Thanks again!!

[JDMather]

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@gdwhitfield wrote:

.... BTW - you mention Ghost .....

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Actually, I don't do any of this - I am an instructor, an end user in the labs.  IT takes care of the image and "ghosting".

So, when I say ghost, I am using it as a generic term, I didn't even know that it referred to a product.  I have no idea what IT uses to set up the labs (other than the Deep Freeze).

[gdwhitfield]

Well, thanks again and have a GREAT school year!

[JDMather]

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@gdwhitfield wrote:
Well, thanks again and have a GREAT school year!

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Start up in two weeks.

Our enrollment is wayyyy up since we adopted 3D as the single source of truth last year.

Digital Prototyping has finally arrived!