I tend to be "appropriately skeptical" about the claims made by program vendors; often, especially when the claims sound "too good to be true," a little examination of the fine print, or experimentation with the program, proves that old maxim. But I have just been blown away (at least after preliminary tests and a very unscheduled problem) by what was, to me, a new class of utility that just saved me a LOT of time and trouble. So much so that I want to share this "RCFoC Innovation Pick" with you.

The program is "GoBack," $69 from Wild File (http://www.goback.com/). (Note that I have no association with Wild File whatsoever, other than being an impressed user of this product, and as always these comments represent my own personal opinion. There's also another product that seems to fit in this niche, SecondChance by PowerQuest (http://www.drivecopy.com/secondchance/index.html), although I have not
yet tried it out.)

My Dual Life.

I lead a dual life when it comes to my computer. On one hand, I have the weekly deadline of researching and writing and publishing the RCFoC for you, which means that I'm very much an end-user, using my PC as a critical tool of my work. I can't afford for my PC to go down or to give me any trouble at all, because like you, I have a job to do that can't afford any wasted time.

On the other hand, by the nature of our exploring the leading edges of computing, I'm always trying out a new utility or patch, or upgrading some software, or generally doing things that do hold the potential to destabilize my system -- OK, I like to "play." As a result, my PC already crashes once or twice a day; and that's quite enough.

When It's Dead In The Water.

So I do live in reasonable fear that one day I'll install the Patch From Hell, or the system will crash during an upgrade, or some other event will take place that leaves me facing a VERY long process of recovering from my backup (if that didn't crash the night before), or much worse yet, of reinstalling Windows and then reinstalling all the applications and utilities and data from ground zero. Now though, there's less chance that I'll have to travel that road again!

GoBack, basically, takes constant transparent snapshots of every change to my disk, and stores them in a space-thrifty way in a special file (which takes up about 10% of my disk space.) The result is that at any time, even after a crash that snarls Windows, GoBack will restore the disk to the exact state it was in at any number of "safe points" (times when there was no disk activity) in the past. (The time span that you can go back is dependant on the size of the file you let GoBack create,
and on the amount of disk activity you do -- typically it seems to extend 3-5 days into the past.)

Seems Like I Tried This Just In Time!

So what would be a worst-case scenario? Imagine that you are getting ready to go on a trip and, because you're a careful sort, you begin one extra full system backup to tape -- only to return a few hours later to find that the system crashed, and WON'T REBOOT!

That's exactly the position I found myself in just before leaving on my recent Switzerland trip. Which would have left me, pre-GoBack, facing the specter of returning a week later, fuzzy from jetlag, to completely rebuild my PC before I could begin work on the next RCFoC. This would not have made for a pleasant trip.

But through some alignment of the planets or other good fortune, I'd just installed GoBack a couple of days before, and with my fingers crossed, I gave it a real live test. Very early in the boot process, before Windows tries to come up, GoBack offers a screen that gives you the opportunity to pick a "safe point" in the past; typically, you'd pick a time just before you did something that you know caused trouble, or far enough back to when you remember that the system was working
normally. I picked a time just prior to my starting my ill-fated backup, and, with great trepidation, told GoBack to "make it so."

To my amazement (and great relief), it did just that.

After just a couple of minutes of chugging away at the disk, Windows began booting in its normal manner, and this time it came up just fine! It was, literally, as if I'd gone back in time and never experienced the problem that could have caused me so much grief.

Of course I still don't know exactly what caused Windows to eat itself, but now that I'm back from my trip, with this safety net in place, I may try that backup again and see what happens.

Recovering From The "Oops."

And there's more. Suppose I'm working on the next issue of the RCFoC and I inadvertently delete some of the articles without noticing, and then hit Save. Then I go on to edit some more stories, and Save again. Even though I have Word set to always keep a backup of the file for me, it only keeps one backup, and so I've now permanently lost my earlier work. Not good.

But that's no longer the case. One of the things I've always liked about Compaq's VMS operating system is its idea of "versioning;" VMS saves historical versions of a file whenever you save it. So after three saves, the disk might contain RCFoC.doc;113, RCFoC.doc;114, and RCFoC.doc;115 (the old file isn't destroyed, it's just given an incremented version number and kept around.) This has saved my bacon more than once over the years. But this concept is foreign to Windows. Or at least it was...

Since GoBack tracks all changes to the hard disk, it knows (and can reproduce) the historical state of any file. So if, at 1 PM, I realize that I deleted some articles from the RCFoC file around 9 AM this morning, I can now "return to those thrilling days of yesteryear," as the Lone Ranger used to say, with a click. Right-clicking on any file will yield a new GoBack entry in the pop-up context menu. Choosing that will present a list of all previous states of the file, sorted by
time (for example, at 11:30, 11:01, 9:45, 9:25, etc.) I can access the file as it was at any of those times with a click, and then either save the file, or simply copy out any lost data that I want to transfer to my current version. There are some other ways to access once-lost data as well, but it really is that simple.

Limitations.

There are a few limitations: GoBack won't work on compressed disks (it works fine with compressed FILES, like .zip files, but not if you're using Windows' or a third party's utility to compress the entire disk), or if you run multiple operating systems (dual-boot). And you do have to disable GoBack prior to doing upgrades to Windows. Also, GoBack currently only works with Windows 95 & 98; nothing before or after, including Windows NT/2000 (although that's due to change.)

Most importantly, GoBack is not a replacement for doing traditional off-disk backups, because if you have a hardware problem and the disk fails, GoBack won't help (since its data is stored on the same disk.)

Summary.

As you can tell, I think GoBack is a great idea that's been well implemented; it certainly proved its worth to me. And while I tend to skip marketing hype, I have to agree with a comment in the interesting (and humorous) CD-based video that accompanies the product; they call this "the missing piece of the operating system." By the way, a free, fully-functioning 10-day demo of GoBack is available at http://www.goback.com/products_gbs_preview.cfm .

What about the future -- could this type of safety net actually migrate right into our CPU chips? The Feb. 8 PC World (http://www.pcworld.com/cgi-bin/pcwtoday?ID=15175) suggests that future
CPUs from Transmeta (in conjunction with their code-morphing software, I suspect) will indeed let you "...reboot and run your computer backward to the spot before it crashed."

But for now, I'll sleep better at night, and fear less when installing new software, than I did before installing GoBack. If GoBack doesn't have any surprises lurking within, it should keep me from being surprised, in a bad way, after some future software upgrade. And those are the kinds of surprises that I can happily live without.

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free
weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey Harrow, Principal
Member of Technical Staff for the Technology and Corporate Development
group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others
around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the
technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc

Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The
RCFoC is Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp.