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Moltron83
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How can I correct issues in a writable app volume without simply recreating it?

Hello -

We are using App Volumes 2.18 and on some occasions have had strange issues which could not be fixed without deleting and then recreating the writable app volume.  This of course starts you over like a fresh PC.  For example in testing we had a user update their acrobat reader application and these updates were written back to the writable.  This caused the application to have several errors when being used.  Uninstall/reinstall or otherwise trying to manually fix this did not work, and thus the writable was erased and recreated after stopping Adobe from updating.

Is it possible to clear the metadata from specific parts of the writable which would pertain to the problem to avoid recreating the whole thing?  I've tinkered a bit with what is in the writable by manually attaching it somewhere and looking through the metadata but its not easy to make sense of whats there.

Also - we have UEM setup, but have stopped using it for a few reasons, so its just the base image + full writable that makes up the desktop.

Thanks in advance!

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Is it possible to clear the metadata from specific parts of the writable which would pertain to the problem to avoid recreating the whole thing?  I've tinkered a bit with what is in the writable by manually attaching it somewhere and looking through the metadata but its not easy to make sense of whats there.

That's the biggest issue. You can add the writable to a machine that does not have an Appvolumes agent installed and look through the disk but it is very hard to get all information you need easily delivered to you by some sort of GUI. You would need to manually remove the files from the svroot folder on the disk and also remove settings (reg keys) that are in the snapvol.dat. You can attach teh snapvol.dat from the writable to regedit.exe but you need to have very good knowledge of how tha application works and where files are being stored in both the registry and the file system.

With applications like Adobe reader it is almost impossible to do that.

You could use the default back-up method from Appvolumes itself? It is not very feature rich but it can create a writable volume back-up for you. This way, if a user messes up his writable you could restore it.

Moltron83
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We've started the scheduled backups for the writables as a safety net for these sort of things. I did attach the .dat file, I just can't find where it stores things like file deletions.  Some applications could be impossible yes - others keep more to themselves in that there are a small number of specific reg entries, and file locations. 

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