Go back, young man.

Had Horace Greeley lived into the computer age, those words might have been attributed to him instead of "go west." The desire to turn back the clock is an odd but pervasive theme amongst expert and novice computer users alike. We are all guilty, to one degree or another, of the sin of not backing up our work, and of regretting it when it is too late.

If only we could travel back in time -- to just a few minutes or hours or days ago. To recapture that lost innocence when we so cavalierly and with carefree abandon typed our hearts out in the great American novel we were writing, or the complex spreadsheet we were calculating, or splendiferous presentation we were preparing when disaster struck.

We didn't save our work, or didn't back it up, and the hard drive crashed, or we overwrote the file, or inadvertently deleted it.

Maybe there's hope for the future. GoBack, by WildFile software of Plymouth, MN, is an innovative, 1st-of-its kind program that allows you to view your hard drive as it was at any previous time as far back as a week ago. GoBack's menu offers three simple functions: create a GoBack drive showing another drive as it was in the past; recover an old version of a file that was deleted or changed; or revert an entire hard drive to the way it was in the past.

Typically using about 10 pct. of your drive, GoBack works in the background to create a twin drive, a sort of parallel universe in another dimension. I did not notice any degradation of system performance while GoBack made and stored its copies, though disk- or CPU-intensive activities, such as multimedia applications, may be affected.

I wasn't brave enough to delete real production files for testing, but I created and deleted a series of new files. I then emptied the Recycle Bin, and rebooted for good measure, using the PC for a long time before attempting to recover the deleted files. I found and viewed them all, then selected the recovery option, which restored them normally to the originating application. Unlike some undelete utilities, no skill or even thinking was required, just a few points and clicks.

GoBack installs itself "ahead" of the operating system, just as if it were a "boot manager," like that of OS/2, NT or System Commander. (For that reason you cannot use GoBack on any system that has a boot manager facility installed. It works on plain vanilla Windows 95 or 98 only.)

When you boot your system you are greeted by the GoBack boot screen before Windows. If your system crashes, and is otherwise unbootable, you can then press the spacebar to revert your drive to an earlier state. Even if the state that is booted is not the ideal one for your purpose, once the system is booted you can probably use GoBack's options to revert again to the time you want.

I did not test this aspect, largely because I only have the preview edition of GoBack, and was not willing to be so adventurous. WildFile will mail a 90-day trial copy to anyone who requests it (see www.goback.com for details).

Street price is about $60. Pretty cheap for a time machine.

• Contents

• Links

• Home