Worth a Look

Rom viruses to spyware to Trojan horses, there’s an abundance of ways for your computer to be rendered unusable or for its data to be corrupted. If you’re lucky enough to have the help of IT professionals, you might be able to get things back to normal without too much trouble. But if you’re on your own, you might wish that you could somehow turn back the clock to the days when the computer was working properly.

With RestoreIT 6, you can do some time traveling. A software program from FarStone Technology, Inc., RestoreIT continually monitors all activities of a computer’s hard drive and creates incremental backups that take only a small amount of the hard drive’s space.

If you run into problems, such as your computer becoming infected by a virus, simply open the program, choose a backup point created prior to infection, and restart the computer. You will only have lost any files created in the interim.

The product even has a way of handling crashes that render Windows unstartable. (The software works only on the Windows operating system.)  RestoreIT overcomes this problem of a crash that affects Windows by giving users the ability to press the spacebar during startup to automatically launch the restore program; since it doesn’t load in Windows, it can be started even if the computer’s operating system was corrupted.

It then takes the computer back to a precorrupted version of the operating system. The software can provide a backup of an entire hard drive (stored on CDs or DVDs) as well as of the incremental restore.

RestoreIT isn’t only for undoing the rare disaster; it also provides file-restore capabilities so that an item mistakenly deleted, or simply written over, can be restored. Setup options allow backups to be done per modification of a file or document (from one to fifty modifications), or limited only by a predetermined amount of backup space. However, you’ll be plagued by error messages if you use too much space for backups.

In my test of the product, the program was quickly and painlessly installed, and it performed as promised. I uninstalled a software program, then did an incremental restore; the computer rebooted and the program was back as before. A file was deleted and the recycle bin emptied, and that file too was quickly restored by the software; similarly, a Microsoft Word document was modified, and then those modifications were undone by the file restore function.

Pros. Provides strong protection against any kind of threat that could disable a computer or corrupt its data or operating system. The program can be password protected so that only authorized users can launch it. The program is extremely intuitive and easy to set up and use.

Cons. It requires at least 400 MB of space, and FarStone recommends reserving from five to ten percent of hard-drive space for RestoreIT data.

Where to get it. The software retails for $39.99 at most major computer stores, and it is also available from FarStone’s Web site. n