Mike said:
What is the easiest software available for backing up and restoring a
working valid XP installation? My dentist doesn't want to learn a lot
but he would like an easy way to restore his system after his young
son corrupts it with viruses, games, bad configurations, etc. He's
not too technical when it comes to computers, so I was wondering if
anyone knew of a very straightforward software that would allow him
to restore his system, even when it wasn't booting.
Use Returnil. It will virtualize all disk I/O after being activated
which means everything to the hard disk, including the registry (since
that is stored in .dat files), can be discarded on a reboot. After
activating its safe mode, all changes made thereafter are gone after a
reboot. Just reboot and you're back to where you were. So the
"restore" is just the time it takes you to reboot your computer.
And it's free. This doesn't obviate the need for backups since, after
all, hard disks go bad. However, for the scenario you presented or for
any computer to which physical access is granted to others, Returnil
makes a great way to let others putz and fark your computer and just a
reboot brings it back to a known good state. While it's free, there is
a payware version with more features. Both versions can be password
protected so others cannot change its configuration. You can either
activate Returnil when you want, like before you do something you think
might be hazardous or you just want to test something and completely
wipe it afterward, or you can configure it to activate everytime your
computer boots up so it's always protected.
Schools use Returnil because they can schedule a reboot of their class
computers (or have the power cycled on them) so those computers are back
to a clean state the next morning for the next class. Users running
kiosk computers can use this (although there are also kiosk software
utilities) so they can let anyone use their computer but have an
immediate method of wiping out all changes, good or bad, made by those
users. I use it to protect the state of my hard disk when I want to
trial some software (that doesn't require a reboot to complete its
install else the reboot would wipe all changes so the install would
disappear - I only have the free version, not the paid version that
would let me elect to save changes). While a virtual machine is a more
isolated environment to test unknown or untrusted software, all hardware
except the CPU is emulated by software which means the virtual machine
runs slow. Everything crawls that you run inside a VM. Virtualizing
just the disk I/O incurs almost no impact to responsiveness of the
computer and you get access to your real hardware, so everything runs at
native speed on your computer when using Returnil. While the video card
in a VM is virtualized, slow, and is old software-emulated hardware
which means you won't want to play anything more than some crossword
puzzle game in a VM, you can run your video game while protected by
Returnil and it'll use the real video card and run at full speed.
Paragon, Macrium, and Easeus all have freeware backup programs. I'm
using the Workstation (payware) version of Easeus ToDo Backup. They all
let you create a bootable CD so you can run their restore program even
when the OS on the hard disk won't load. There is a WinPE version of
the bootable CD but you have to buy the payware version to use that. It
lets you boot into a Windows environment upon which their backup/restore
program will load which gives you the opportunity of using Windows tools
for more advanced recovery. The free versions come with a Linux-based
bootable rescue CD. These are backup programs. The Easeus product lets
you create full backup and the much smaller incremental backups. The
doctor may not know how far back he wants to restore his computer and
just one backup, like a clone, means he can only go back one image - AND
it assumes that the cloned hard disk doesn't have the same problems as
the master hard disk that you cloned. If the computer is infected and
you do a clone then your only backup, the clone, is also infected.
Cloning is easy but requires you have another hard disk of equal or
greater size on which to store the image. You can then later simply
swap in the other hard disk for the bad one (the hard disk went bad or
the OS won't boot anymore). Cloning is really for hardware recovery:
your hard disk failed, you swap in the cloned hard disk, and you
continue working while you get a replacement hard disk on the side.
Backups are for when you want the availability of restoring your
computer back to more than one prior state.
