Black Cat Stellar Shield 3.0

Stellar has launched a 'pre-crash' data protection software -'Black Cat

Stellar Shield 3.0'. It also comes bundled with K7 anti-virus. After

installation, the software takes a snapshot of critical system information and

files and stores them in a hidden area of the hard disk as images. Capturing

these snapshots can be automated through its scheduler, which gives users the

freedom to choose the files/drives for taking images.

We did wish the system could backup the snapshots to an external storage such

as a USB device or a network drive, because if the images get formatted or

corrupted by accident or a virus attack, then it can improve chances of data

retrieval.

Blackcat only works with Windowsand provides two recovery options: GUI and

DOS based. GUI based recovery is obviously simple and easy to use, and is useful

if nothing major has gone wrong with the system, and you just need to recover

some accidentally deleted files.

If a complete drive fails, then the system can be booted using the Blackcat

disk in DOS mode. This is supposed to enable you to either rebuild the drive or

recover files from the hard disk. Files that you recover can be sent to a floppy

drive or an external hard drive which has a valid FAT partition. Here again, we

wished the software would let you restore files to a USB or network drive, or at

least support other partition formats like FAT32 or NTFS.

We tested this software on a Windows XP machine. The GUI recovery tool was

quite easy to use and we were able to retrieve 1 GB of data that we deleted in

less than 2 minutes. So as long as your Windows is running, recovering

accidentally deleted files is a piece of cake with this software.

We then tested the software for rebuilding drives. For this, we deleted a

partition using fdisk, and then booted the machine with the Stellar disk. All

data remained intact, and we were able to recover it. However, it was not able

to recover the lost partition, rebuild the MBR and boot Windows from it. This

was a little disappointing because the software's manual clearly mentioned that

it was possible.

We've tested other Stellar products before, but never faced this problem.

Possibly Stellar will fix it in their next release.

K7 AntiVirus



This is an anti virus solution from K7 which helps you protect your PC from
trojans, viruses, Internet worms and harmful scripts. This is just a basic

anti-virus and doesn't have any other features like anti-spam, personal

firewall, etc. The user friendly interface guides you to perform different

actions and configure the scanning as per your wish. It also gives you the

flexibility to scan particular drives/folders unlike in Norton 360. Once

installed, it scans every file that is opened or executed, thus ensuring that no

infected file if found can affect the system. Apart from this, it scans e-mails

and Instant Messaging attachments. We did wish that this anti-virus also had

firewall support as well, but then it's not a major concern if you're happy with

your built-in Windows based firewall.

We tested this software on a Windows XP machine containing viruses and

malware. During scan, it detected almost all the viruses. It was not able to

detect viruses present in compressed files, but when we tried to extract them it

did raise an alarm.

Other antivirus software we've reviewed in the past, e.g. QuickHeal were able

to detect viruses even within compressed files. RAM consumption of this software

as compared to Norton 360 was considerably lower, and it did not slowdown the PC

as was the case with Norton 360.

Bottomline: A good combo pack for personal use, barring a few glitches

that we hope will be rectified in the next release.