Recover your 7, XP, etc by PC booting from USB device

[codger]

This sounds like a really useful product. I can't imagine that someone hasn't done this commercially long ago. A really useful repair tool. I am not familiar with CMS, but this sounds like a winner. (Why didn't I think of this?)


http://www.cmsproducts.com/detail.aspx?ID=1305

[The Gorn]

Just a couple of comments.

If you Google this product name you get 123,000 hits. That's the pattern you see with SPAMmy companies that stuff "press releases" and spam sites out to the entire world consistently.

So it makes it almost impossible to find a legitimate review of the stuff. Actual reviews are buried under all of the link sharing crap.

I did find some reviews on Cnet and Amazon, both quite positive.

But I'm still a bit suspicious of their promotion techniques. It's difficult to find an honest review of the product.

Secondly, this product sort of sounds like a system backup tool, but with more. It's kind of hard for me to get a fix on what it actually provides.

My concern is that a "fully automated" recovery system will wind up erasing your recent work.

[pxsant]

I don't know about the company you listed.

There is another product from http://www.dposoft.net/ called HDD Regenerator.  You can create a bootable USB stick or a bootable CD for it. 

The program repairs defective sectors on a hard disk by reading the bad data, rebuilding it and writing it back to disk.  I have used to repair disks which would not boot and it has worked most of the time.

This program will work on any disk format including Windows and Linux.  It doesn't care.

For $39 it is a great tool to keep around.  If you use it a single time to save your data, it was worth it.  I have used it to save client's data several times.

[codger]

Just a couple of comments.

If you Google this product name you get 123,000 hits. That's the pattern you see with SPAMmy companies that stuff "press releases" and spam sites out to the entire world consistently.

So it makes it almost impossible to find a legitimate review of the stuff. Actual reviews are buried under all of the link sharing crap.

I did find some reviews on Cnet and Amazon, both quite positive.

But I'm still a bit suspicious of their promotion techniques. It's difficult to find an honest review of the product.

Secondly, this product sort of sounds like a system backup tool, but with more. It's kind of hard for me to get a fix on what it actually provides.

My concern is that a "fully automated" recovery system will wind up erasing your recent work.

I was alerted to the existence of this product via an email from PC World. I have not, (Mac only environment) pursued this product. I'm commenting on the basis of my "gee whiz, what a neat idea" reaction. I wish I would have had this capability when I was a Wintel user.

[The Gorn]

Without a significant base of real news about this product, it's difficult for me to be enthusiastic about it. It sounds worthwhile, don't get me wrong, but the Windows market is full of fly by night junk products, too, including some that are just plain dangerous. (Like antiviruses that install malware.)

Whereas a (open source) tool like BartPE has been around forever and has a large user base.

I rely on a base of other users to go first with something that makes claims like this.

[pxsant]

I was not able to link to the site earlier.  Returned an error.   Since I was able to read the info I do have some comments.

The program seems to operate similar to disk replication where data saved on the primary disk is also written to the backup disk in native format.

In theory this might be fine but I suspect that there would be a pretty significant performance penalty with a system like this running in software (likely as a service) rather than being performed at the hardware level.

On the positive side, it would be an automatic process where you would not have to initiate a backup.  One of the failures in user initiated backups is that they usually never get done since you are always too busy.  When you finally need to restore a backup, it may be well outdated or not exist at all.

All things considered,I think I would prefer to use something like Acronis even though the backup depends on me.