Incremental updates issues

[HA Nut]

I run 2 Win 7 laptops (1 is Starter and 1 is Home Premium.) Both healthy, up to date/fully patched.

I have 2 personal licenses of MBAM. And, I live with very, very slow dial up internet.

My issues with the incremental updates is that unless I do them at least once daily, they fail and MBAM decides it needs to load the entire database. Which can take an hour or more! Beyond that, even if I do update once a day, they sometimes fail anyway and I am stuck with a huge download. When this happens, I usually have to stop the download and I end up with a corrupt rules.ref file.

My fix is often to do without MBAM for a few days, haul my laptops to where ever I can get WiFi, delete the old rules.ref file and then download the latest rules. Not handy or practical at all!

I know 1.60 is the first version with incrementals and I understand the process will likely be tweaked over time. But no other software I use that offers incrementals does this. If they can update incrementally, they always do. As you might imagine, this is something I would like to see improved. 1 minute or 2 minutes vs 1 hour (or more) makes a huge difference!

Ideas that have come to mind... perhaps a means to permanently force incrementals and not allow the program to go into full download mode. Or if that is not practical, force incremental updates unless the program hasn't been updated for say 15 days (or maybe as long as 30??)

Any help that can be applied to this problem would be greatly, greatly appreciated! You have a good product! Hopefully you can make it better for me and users like me!

[exile360]

Greetings

If the database gets too many versions behind, then it will do a full download. This is because the number of changes in the database would be so considerable that there would be no gain in simply downloading the changes (it would end up being basically a completely new database anyway).

As for the corruption issues, that is more of a problem. We do plan to eventually have a fallback option by likely keeping the last known good database in case the current database or download gets corrupted, but I do not know when that feature will make it into the product, but that would at least eliminate the need to have to download the entire database again (assuming the backup is new enough that it itself is not so out of date as to render an incremental update moot).

[HA Nut]

Thanks for the reply!

I do understand that from a logical perspective, there is a point of no benefit between a large incremental update vs just replacing the entire rules.ref file.

But to clarify what I was trying to say, if I go more than a day or so, I am usually stuck with having to download a complete file. Surely 2 or 3 days worth of incremental changes cannot be remotely close to over 6 MB of a complete rules.ref file.

This is the crux of my request... being able to download a larger amount/percentage of incremental updates before the complete file download overrides the incremetal process.

Thanks for listening!

[exile360]

I'm not sure what the limit is, but it is many updates in between. It may not amount to 6MB in changes, but it would be significant enough that it would likely be far more prone to error, as it must compare each and every incremental change with the existing database after downloading, and also verify that each incremental update downloaded is not corrupted, so the more incremental updates you have to download in one shot to get up to date, the more likely problems will occur. When downloading the entire database, it only has to verify a single file, and no incremental changes must be compared.

Also keep in mind that the number of days is irrelevant here, as it's really all about the number of database updates. Currently we've been pushing out a very large number of database updates per day. For example, today alone there were 11 databases released (as measured by GMT, as currently we're already up to database #4 for tomorrow, assuming you're in the US).

My recommendation would be to check for updates at least once per day, as that will save you bandwidth assuming the update completes successfully, and will also ensure that you have the latest updates more frequently, providing better protection.

Now, all that being said, the maximum number of updates for a full update to be required vs an incremental update is something that we may consider changing in the future if we find it to be a common occurrence that our users, such as yourself, require it, so your feedback certainly will play a part in any such decision.