Five Recovery Apps Bring Your PC Back From The Dead

By Serdar Yegulalp

October 30, 2006

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"Bare-metal recovery" is a term used by system administrators to describe the process of wiping a computer clean and restoring it to life from a total system backup. Sometimes it's the only way to get things running again, especially if you don't have the time to reinstall Windows the conventional way.

Restoring from a full-system backup has a lot of other advantages over a traditional reinstall: You don't have to reinstall applications, restore user data or accounts, or perform tricky end-runs around the system to do things like recover protected data. Everything comes back in one fell swoop.

Bare-metal recovery is also one of the biggest features missing from Windows itself. There's no native way to make a system-wide backup and then restore it in one step if things go wrong. Granted, Windows has some nice incremental recovery options (System Restore comes to mind), and a decent file-and-directory backup tool, but no built-in way to restore everything at once. Sure, Microsoft has promised a full system-recovery function in Windows Vista, but upgrading to Vista is still a long way off for many people -- and for some it's not an option at all. What can we do now about the problem?

To that end, a number of third-party software makers have stepped in and provided software solutions of their own. In this round-up, I review five of them -- from Symantec's latest revision of Norton Ghost (now Norton Backup and Restore) to the light but useful Image for Windows. All of these applications have the basic ability to back up and restore an entire system disk without needing to boot to Windows, and can restore to and from a variety of backup media -- usually attached hard drives or CD/DVD-Rs.

Acronis True Image Home

Acronis makes a whole spate of really solid products for system backup and recovery. They don't just cover standalone desktop PCs, but servers and managed corporate workstations as well; there's something in the product lineup for just about everyone.

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