maybe this is a problem or a feature.

I just updated to 2.85, and love the fact that I can now much more easily access my book marks from within the browser, but while searching the sandbox for the folder where my downloads go, I was surprised to learn that Sandboxie was storing an exact copy of my user account settings, including my entire desktop and all the data stored there! Is this the way the program works now to allow for a "better" user experience? If so, I'm fine with it, it's a fair tradeoff for the security Sandboxie provides. But it just seems a little bit of a waste of disk space. Especially for someone like me who tends to dump stuff on the desktop.

Ardak

Generally Sandboxie doesn't go copying any more than necessary. If you saw a lot of stuff in there, maybe you got sandboxed programs to touch all that stuff.

In any case, your report of all the stuff you saw cloned, is a bit vague.

Apologies for the vagueness... However, it literally looked like it cloned my entire user profile, supported by the fact that when I just deleted the sandbox, it prompted confirmation on the deletion of 330 folders containing 3000+ files...

The only process that I'm sandboxing, is Firefox, however, the Download folder *is* linked to the desktop. Would that cause sandboxie to clone the desktop?

not really, it would only make a copy of the desktop folder if anything, (which should consist of pretty much nothing but icons, unless you also have folders and stuff on your desktop) but still, the weird thing is that just because you have something linked to a certain folder, doesnt mean that folder is going to be replicated in sandboxie, the only thing that should be in the sandbox is anything that is accessed by a sandboxed process.

That's what I was thinking. I just dumped another session and scoped out the sand box before doing so, and it looked fine then, only cloning what was necessary and such. This sandbox was only 19 MB in size compared to the earlier one that was 487 MB. odd. Maybe it was just a fluke.

Could be that you run something inside the sandbox that actually touched each and every file that you then saw sandboxed?

Maybe some kind of scanner or search.

If it asks for write access to the files it scans -- even if it doesn't actually modify them -- then Sandboxie will have to clone them.