From...

July 28, 1999
Web posted at: 11:23 a.m. EDT (1523 GMT)

by Stan Miastkowski

(IDG) -- We've all wished we could step back in time and start over again. And while that's impossible for us, it is possible for your PC with a utility introduced this week by PowerQuest.

SecondChance, according to the company, can restore a troubled system by taking it back to the point in time that it was working properly. The utility, which will sell for $69, will be available in mid-August.

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SecondChance goes beyond utilities that continuously back up specified files (such as PowerQuest's DataKeeper) by taking system snapshots at specified intervals. The default is once per day, although you can specify the capture intervals, up to once an hour. The utility, which runs continuously in the background, takes up about 160KB of disk space.

"It's a delta technology," says Travis Lee, SecondChance's product manager. That is, after the initial snapshot, each subsequent one stores only the changes that have occurred in your PC (system and application files, Windows Registry, documents, and so on) since the last snapshot. It tracks all folders and files that have been deleted, modified, renamed, or created since the last snapshot.

If a problem develops, such as system instability after a new application is installed, SecondChance can restore the system to its exact state before the installation. And if necessary, the program can use multiple snapshots to return the system to an even earlier incarnation.

Snapshots can vary widely in size, according to Lee, depending on how much work you've done or whether you've installed new applications since the last snapshot. Most snapshots will be small, but they can be many megabytes in size. SecondChance lets you specify the maximum amount of hard drive space used for snapshot storage. (The default is 10 percent of the drive.) SecondChance requires that snapshots be stored on the boot drive; you can't save them on another drive in the same machine or to a network drive.

Tiptoeing backward

SecondChance also includes features to make sure you don't lose important work created since the last snapshot if you need to roll back to an earlier system configuration.

A situation like this can occur, for example, when you install a new application or utility, create documents, and then your PC starts to become unstable. Reverting to the last system snapshot would wipe out your documents. But before rolling back to a previous snapshot, SecondChance lets you view which folders and files have changed. If you need to prevent your latest work from being deleted when you revert to an earlier configuration, you can copy it to another drive or other media before confirming the restoration.