Stellar Shield 7

Stellar 7 is the latest addition to Stellar's range of data

recovery software. The software comes in two floppies-a Setup disk and a

Recovery disk. The setup disk contains installation programs for DOS and Win 9x.

The Recovery disk contains software for data recovery.

To install the software you need at least 2 MB of hard disk

space. You can install the software either through DOS or Windows. When

installed through DOS, it automatically runs at boot time and saves a copy of

disk image on the hard disk. You can later save this image on floppy disks.

Different images are created for different physical drives, though the logical

drives share a common image file. However, we found the process of saving the

image file in DOS pretty slow.

The Win 9x version is far more convenient and flexible.

Saving the image is much faster and can be done at Windows Startup, daily,

weekly or at a fixed interval. One option common to both platforms is the

Hierarchy count, which lets you specify the number of copies of the disk image

you wish to save. The default value is three, which means that three distinct

copies of the image can be saved on the hard disk, for three different days, and

on the fourth day, the oldest image will be replaced by the new image.

We conducted three types of tests. In the first case, we

formatted the hard disk and ran the recovery software. It found a saved image of

the disk on the formatted disk, which was then used to restore the disk to its

pre-formatted state. The software also offers facilities for recovering data

from floppy disks.

We also tried to restore deleted files. We deleted all the

files from our disk and ran defrag on it. On running the recovery software, we

got an option of restoring all or selected files, and we could successfully

recover all our deleted files using the image stored on the hard disk.

After the recovery process was complete, we deleted the files

once more, defragmented the hard disk, and rebooted the machine. But this time,

recovery failed. This is because when the machine was restarted, another image

of the disk (defragmented) was created which replaced our old image

(fragmented). This is a limitation of the software, as images of the disk

created on the same day replace each other. So, it's quite possible that, if

you defrag your disk and restart the machine, you may be unable to recover a

file which you might have deleted just 10 minutes ago.

Another important thing to note is that recovered files

can't be saved to the disk from which recovery is being attempted. Thus when

recovering files from a hard disk, files can only be saved to a floppy disk or

another hard disk. You can't save them even on a different partition on the

same drive.

Finally, we tested the software by removing all disk

partitions. Upon running the recovery software, a previously saved image was

found on the hard disk and the disk was restored to its previous state. However,

in this case when we tried restoring files from the disk image stored on floppy

diskettes, the recovery wasn't completely successful. Some of the files were

missing and even Windows didn't run properly. So you have to be careful when

storing the image on a floppy. Ensure that you store several copies of the image

on multiple floppies.

Nevertheless, Stellar Shield 7 provides a fast, efficient and

reliable method of data recovery. The fact that it provides insurance against

invaluable data at an attractive price of Rs 1,490 makes it an ideal buy.

Kunal Dua at PCQ Labs