Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Comodo Time Machine (CTM) is a simple but powerful system rollback utility that lets users quickly restore their computer to an earlier point of time. Unlike Windows System Restore (WSR), CTM creates a complete record of your entire system including the Windows registry, critical OS files, installed programs and user created documents with seconds. Oh, and best of all, it's absolutely free (as in beer)."

We have all come across this problem before. Your friend, relative or co-worker calls you up and tells you that their computer is not working. On promises of cookies, money or whatever else they are willing to barter, you check out their setup and find it severely messed up. One of the most handy tools I have found in those situations is System Restore. Born out of the unmentionable Windows ME, it is a great way to rewind mistakes. From the looks of it, Time Machine takes things a step further and gives you a bit more control over the restore process. Of course, no matter what you use, more important is a backup of your data on a separate medium. Do not forget that or one day you may find your hard drive clicking for attention.

"Following a brief preview at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January, LaCie today announced the availability of the Windows Home Server-powered 5big Backup Server, a 5-bay appliance targeted at the small business market, offering centralised file-sharing, backup and restore for up to 10 PCs and 25 Apple Macs."

This beast which comes with 5TB or 10TB of storage is firmly aimed at the small business market, but can quite easily be used for the home if you want. It has LaCie's own backup software rather than relying on the WHS inbuilt backup, and this also includes the unusual feature of Apple Mac Time Machine backups for up to 25 Mac machines. Prices are in the range of small businesses rather than the home with a 5TB option including 3 year warranty costing $1,199.99 (US) or €1074.99.

"Seagate's objective in designing its Replica backup kit was to make a replica of Time Machine, but for Windows PCs. It works exactly as promised, and in similar fashion to Apple's no-brainer backup system. Plugged in, its setup process was numbingly simple: agree to the TOS and you're about done. It then records a complete backup of your system and begins keeping track of changes you make. By cleverly journaling and organizing each sequential backup, the archive is unlikely to get substantially larger than the system it's attached to. As a result, you can dip into your machine's history, recover files, and restore the system in the event of disaster. It comes with a special boot CD to help in the event of the latter."

Backups are so very important. I'm really surprised Microsoft has not made more of an effort to publicize the tools already available. I've been using Microsoft Sync Toy for a while and been very happy with it. I have an automated daily job that syncs all my data to a second physical drive in my desktop. I've also got two manual jobs that I run less regularly, one syncs to a network drive and the other to a portable drive which I keep off-site. If you are looking for a turnkey solution, with very little setup on your part, this looks like the way to go.