Everyone knows — or at least should know — of the importance of backing up your system regularly to protect against a system catastrophe, or at least of simply taking periodic snapshots of your system configuration to recover from unexpected problems like virus attacks or application installations gone awry.
RestoreIT 7 from FarStone Technology functions similarly to utilities like Symantec's GoBack (or Windows' own built-in System Restore Points feature) in that it can undo system changes and restore a computer to a previous configuration state. It also serves as a more conventional backup utility that can restore data ranging from an entire system down to a single folder or file. While many backup utilities require that you manually reinstall the Windows operating system and the backup utility itself before a restore can be performed, RestoreIT allows you to save a considerable amount of time and effort by performing a complete system restore from a command prompt.
All the information needed to restore data via RestoreIT is held in compressed archive files that the utility stores in a hidden partition on your system's hard drive. It can additionally utilize writable optical media like a CD-R or more appropriately a DVD-R/RW disc (RestoreIT supports single-layer writing at present), or in many cases, an external hard disk.
Space Considerations
Before installing RestoreIT, Farstone recommends that you run through a pre-install checklist, which includes running Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter. Defragmenting the hard drive is particularly important since RestoreIT puts its (required) hidden partition at the physical end of the hard disk. Thus, compacting the existing data frees up more contiguous free space for this partition to occupy (a minimum of 420MB is required).
On some systems, though, there might be files classified as unmovable (shown in green by the defrag utility) even after defragmenting. If any of these areas are located toward the end of the disk, or if you're just low on disk space generally, the amount of space available for RestoreIT to use will be limited, and possibly severely.
Although you can use an optical drive or external hard disk in addition to the hidden partition, you can only use these devices to store complete system backups. Incremental restore points must be stored on the hidden partition, so even if you have gobs of space elsewhere, a cramped partition will limit the number of restore points you can retain before existing restore points must be purged to make space.
Another important consideration is that RestoreIT performs complete system backups not from within Windows but rather at the system boot from a real mode utility stored its own partition. As a result, for complete backups RestoreIT can only recognize storage devices that were enumerated by the system BIOS at boot time. Machines more than a few years old may have a BIOS unable to detect external USB or Firewire hard drives (even though they may work perfectly in Windows), and on such machines, RestoreIT will be unable to utilize these devices.
Any or all of the aforementioned limitations can put a serious crimp in RestoreIT's usefulness. In addition, the size RestoreIT's hidden partition is fixed at the time of installation, so even if you later manage to free up additional space on your hard drive, you won't be able to take advantage without un- and then reinstalling the software — and losing all your existing backups in the process.
