Recover your Data

PC Shadow, as the name suggests, is a simple data backup and recovery utility. The software takes a snapshot of the critical parts of your hard drive, and stores them in a 4 MB protected area on it. Suppose your Operating System became corrupt after you installed or uninstalled an application. You can use PC Shadow to restore your OS to its previous state. It can even restore a formatted drive, as long as you’ve taken its snapshot before formatting. 

The software can be used by anyone who uses a PC with Windows 9x or ME, and wants an easy way to keep his or her machine running smoothly. It’s extremely easy to use, as it has only two primary functions–take a snapshot and restore. It only protects the primary hard drive on your system, and not the other drives. The software comes on a floppy, and you have to boot your PC from it to install it. You can’t install it on another machine using the same floppy without uninstalling the first one. Not only that, but you also have to strictly follow the uninstallation procedure, else the floppy becomes useless. The software requires a password every time you use it. To take a snapshot, it requires a date password, which is basically entering the date in YYMMDD format. It can only restore the last snapshot. You can enter its main interface by pressing the Home key when your PC starts up. 

The Bottom Line. PC Shadow takes about 10-15 seconds to take a snapshot. While it’s an easy to use utility, one thing that’s definitely missing is an autobackup facility. The software should be able to automatically take a snapshot every time the PC boots, instead of relying on the user to do it manually. Plus, the software is only meant to restore the complete hard drive, and not parts of it. So even if you’ve accidentally deleted a single file, you would have to restore the complete snapshot in order to recover it.

Sukhsagar Prajapati  at PCQ Labs