Losing his cables

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:13

Jon Honeyball changes allegiance by cashing in the beloved PC for a Mac! No, he hasn't lost his mind - only his cable. He also attempts to get some order out of Windows 2000

This approach doesn't work well on NTFS where you can't low-level undelete something when it's been deleted, but there is a solution to hand in the shape of Undelete 2 from Executive Software - when I was playing with the latest version of Diskeeper I decided to install the shrinkwrap of Undelete 2 too The new version of this software is Windows 2000-compatible so you can feel safe running it on that platform.

My views about it remain basically the same: it does what it claims it will, and if you want long-term undelete protection on Windows 2000, it might well be just the ticket. But be warned that the level of control it gives is very impressive, and this extends to allowing you to set up an exclusion list of files that won't be stored for subsequent undeletion. The default exclusion list includes all JPG files, and I can see why it decided to do this - day-to-day Web browsing does result in a lot of JPG files being downloaded to your computer. I ran a test of Undelete by deleting a pile of scanned image files, and the high-resolution BMP files were there in the undelete bin while the JPGs had all disappeared. Since Undelete replaces the standard wastebasket those files were well and truly gone, and after a few moments of cursing I discovered the relevant section in the Undelete configuration manager and killed off the immediate deletion of JPG files.

If you want an equivalent utility for Windows 95 or 98, you hit a sticky problem; namely, that it isn't terribly easy to insert something like a big undelete buffer underneath good old MS-DOS. However, the people at Adaptec have managed to do it by acquiring a program called GoBack from Wild File, which promises to allow you to recover your files and system state back to any previous version: you can work on an Excel file, save it during the day with the same filename and then roll back the changes to any one of the intermediate saves. You can download a demo version of GoBack from the company's Web site at www.goback.com

I must confess I was very dubious about the capabilities of this program, as installing a large undelete and snapshot buffer beneath Windows 98 and MS-DOS seemed like the sort of task that only the truly brave or downright foolhardy would attempt. I made sure the machine was fully backed up first, then ran the setup program and it did various installation things, finally telling me I ought to reboot. After rebooting I was presented with a graphical menu offering to enable or disable the GoBack facility; I took the former option, and the machine booted as usual. During the setup program there was a great deal of disk activity, when I presume it was taking a long hard look at the hard disk and making a snapshot or something equivalent.

Once the program was up and running I had my Windows 98 SE Desktop back, working like always, except that there was an extra icon in the tray. I created a Word file, filled it with some text and then saved the file, opened it again, made some changes and saved the file again. I repeated this procedure a few more times to build up a decent buffer, then opened up the GoBack management tool, where to my surprise all the previous versions of the file were listed and I could undelete any of them and thus restore my working file to a previous version. I could even undelete under a different name and then have both versions.

I can't deny that GoBack did the task I asked of it, but I still have a few reservations. First, it seemed to get hot under the collar when I spent a few hours editing some very large digital imaging files: creating backups, and backups of backups, caused the disk to thrash considerably more than usual, so if you make a lot of use of disk I/O this should be taken into consideration. Second, I'm not terribly sure what would happen if I ran a disk defragmenter on the machine while GoBack was running. Given that Windows 98 has an almost neurotic sensitivity to disk writes when doing defragmentation, I could see how GoBack and the defrag program might get into an endless argument.

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