Involution RecoverPC review

Windows System Restore is a godsend for people who don't make backups on a regular basis - which is probably most of us.

Even serious problems can be brushed aside in a few minutes, as long as the PC can boot into Windows and there's a suitable Restore Point from which to work. If not, you're stuffed.

That's where RecoverPC comes in. Manufacturer Involution claims this little gadget can protect a PC against all software problems, including a non-working Windows installation, and that it works its magic in an instant.

RecoverPC consists of a tiny PCI card that looks like a mutated DIMM. There isn't much to see, since most of the card is covered by a metal plate that Involution describes as a "thermal and impact resistant heat shield". Unless you plan on putting your PC through orbital re-entry, though, the plate is only good for hiding the handful of chips.

Once fitted, RecoverPC requisitions a number of hard disk sectors for its own use almost as soon as the PC is switched on. It uses anything between 100MB to 4GB worth, depending on the capacity of the drive. The sectors are marked as 'unavailable', which means they're strictly off limits to all applications, partitioning tools and low-level formatting utilities; hard disk controllers use the same technique to prevent sectors of a hard disk with physical defects being used.

RecoverPC uses these sectors to store a baseline - a snapshot of the current logical state of the drive - as well as any further changes to the drive's contents.

Armed with this information, RecoverPC uses it to restore a PC back to the working baseline state when a problem occurs. The difference between it and Windows System Restore is that the PC doesn't need a working Windows installation for the recovery to happen. RecoverPC has its own BIOS that pops up the recovery options before it looks for an operating system to boot.

RecoverPC is activated by pressing a key combination at boot time, or it can be set to restore a drive automatically after a set number of days, or even upon every reboot. True to Involution's word, the restore process is near instant, regardless of its scale. We deleted our test PC's primary NTFS partition and created a new FAT32 one in its place, and RecoverPC undid the damage in a couple of seconds.

RecoverPC is only as good as its baseline, and there's only one baseline at that, so ensure that it's taken when the PC is in a pristine state. You can update the baseline at any time, such as when you've installed a new application and you're sure that it's working properly.

Despite being ideal for a PC that's prone to regular catastrophic changes, RecoverPC is no substitute for a good backup. It works only on a PC's system partition, and you'll need to store your documents on a different, non-monitored partition if you want to stop them being wiped out by a rollback.

Author: Julian Prokaza