CoJo,
I can't make a specific recomendation, but I'll tell you what I know (or think I know
) about
GoBack and give you some guidelines you can use to make a decision. But, I urge you to do some research on the Internet. Look for other rollback utilities. Read some reviews. Visit some some forums and form your own opinions.
About
Goback. It runs in the background monitoring disk activity and recording all changes. It's no substitue for a backup utility; mainly it's used to recover from installation of bad drivers, applicatons, software updates, and infections from malware, just like
System Restore. When you boot your computer, GB displays a splash screen before Windows loads, giving you the option to disable the program or initiate a recovery. Once Windows has booted, you can access it from the Start Menu or from an icon in the System Tray to configure it.
The good news:
GoBack 3.0 Personal Edition comes with
Norton SystemWorks 2002, and I installed it on my parents'
Windows 98SE-based computer about 3 years ago. It's never caused caused a problem, and I used it once to restore their computer. I've read numerous posts in various forums that it's a great product, superior to
System Restore, and has pulled many butts outta the fire. It's easy to install and set up. Unlike SR, which doesn't monitor data files, GB monitors all changes to a hard drive, which means when it restores a hard drive it also restores the data as well. For example, if something corrupts your
My Documents directory causing you to lose all your data,
GoBack will restore it. I didn't notice any performance impact on their machine, 600 Mhz Celeron with 256 MB of memory (originally 64 MB when GB was installed) and a 20 MB hard drive.
Now the bad news: I also run NSW 2002 on my computer, and the option to install
GoBack was disabled when I installed the suite. Apparently it's incompatible with
Windows XP. Possibly it's just that the installer recognized that
System Restore was running, but I believe I checked the manual at the time (about a year ago) and discovered that it's the former. Newer versions of it may be comatible with XP though. The personal edition only supports one restore point, but I suspect the full version doesn't have this limitation. (I certainly wouldn't pay for the upgrade if it did.)
The flip side of
GoBack's ability to restore data is that you also can lose data, and recently installed applications, drivers, and software updates as well. Conceptually, GB makes a snapshot of your drive to use as a baseline and records all subsequent changes to it. When it restores the hard drive, it looks at the drive's current state along with the baseline information and the recorded changes to determine how to do the rollback. As a result, during a recovery new files and the changes to the existing ones are lost. Also, any deleted files will reappear (which can be a good thing if you deleted them accidentally
). Another implication of this is that if you use GB, you should remember to periodically disable and reenable it to minimize the loss should you need to use it to roll back your computer. Like
System Restore, if you disable it, you lose the ability to roll back your computer past the point where you reenable it.
Because it monitors and records all changes, you should disable GB before defragmenting the hard drive, for two reasons. One, its continuous recording in its binary file of changes to the drive can interfere with defraggers. The defragger notices the changes to GB's binary file causing it to restart; System Restore doesn't cause this problem because it doesn't record all disk updates. (Norton Speed Disk does seem to be "GoBack-aware," but I noticed that the number of restarts was drastically reduced by disabling GB before defragging the hard drive on my parents' computer.) Second, all the changes made to the hard drive during defragging fills GB's binary store. It's speculation on my part, but presumably this means that when the store is full, older changes are incorporated into the baseline to make room to save the new ones, which limits how far you can go back.
Unlike
System Restore, you'll find plenty of posts in forums from people complaining that
GoBack crashed or trashed their computer. But as I said, there are a lot of people singing its praises, loudly. The last time I actively monitored this, I remember estimating that sentiments ranged from 60/40 in favor of GB to 40/60 against it, depending upon the forum and time frame. This leads me to conclude that overall it was about six to one and half a dozen to the other.
Based on the above, I don't see a compelling reason to disable
System Restore and switch to
GoBack.
See my next post for information about drive imaging tools.
Regards,
Hornus
