Slower oace said:
After I upgraded to XP, the first thing I installed was Norton Utilities
2004, including GoBack. Both that and Restore set aside disk space, and it
appears to me they do the same thing. Out of curiousity I disabled Restore
and gained several GB of disk space. Should I leave it disabled and depend
on GoBack, which runs before Windows loads? Or should I use both?
GoBack keeps a running track of *all* files on a harddrive.
Windows system restore tracks only a finite set of core system files.
If you were for instance to delete an important spreadsheet, Word document,
or other user created data file GoBack would be able to recover the file
where System Restore would not.
GoBack also has the advantage of being able to recover your system from
*software* corruption that prevents Windows from starting or to restore the
computer to a state prior to a viral infection or other such mishap. System
Restore does not have this capability. Neither of course is any good in the
event of a physical drive failure.
On the down side GoBack does somewhat affect performance as a side affect of
having to monitor all files. On a reasonably fast system with sufficient
resources the performance degradation is negligible enough to be
unnoticeable. System Restore only uses resources as it makes a restore
point. The rest of the time it is dormant. The other thing I find
disappointing about GoBack is the limited restore history available under
Windows XP on an NTFS drive. Under Windows 98 I generally get several weeks
of restorable history. Under XP I get four or five days tops. I attribute
this to the additional overhead in the way of disk activity for Windows XP
and the NTFS file system. It is enough however to correct a situation that
prevents Windows from starting or to recover recently deleted, corrupted or
changed files.
On my Desktop computer I leave both running as there is no good reason not
to. This has proved to be non-problematic for nearly two years. On my laptop
where performance and disc space is more of an issue I use only system
restore and rely on backups for disaster recovery.
--
D
I'm not an MVP a VIP nor do I have ESP.
I was just trying to help.
Please use your own best judgment before implementing any suggestions or
advice herein.
No warranty is expressed or implied.
Your mileage may vary.
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