Wild, Man, Wild
This may be next best thing to McAfee Virus Protection. I have never come across a
sales laptop that did not have some form of virus protection stored on it. Everyone knows
sooner or later a virus is going to get you; no matter how careful you may be, it's the
simple law of averages.
What else could happen to ruin your day? Accidental erasing of file? Perhaps your
system battery choked while you were in the middle of updating a file that you'd worked on
for hours? You're working from home and an electrical spike hits your juice and everything
goes pop? I can think of a million stories -- many of them I have lived. Especially the
one where I loaded a new piece of software only to have it hose up everything.
Enter GoBack from Wild File. This software creates a virtual time machine which allows
you to press a button and go back in time to restore either a selected file or an entire
disk image. When I received the evaluation package in the mail, I was quite
skeptical. It installed painlessly enough and created a virtual drive to store the
archived file images.
Then the system went blank during booting. I called Wild File Tech Support and spoke
with a warm and knowledgeable woman by the name of Jean. Once I described my symptom she
immediately diagnosed the problem. It seems Windows 98 has a limit on the number of
virtual device drivers which may be used. This is a particular problem for those of us
with multiple CD-ROM drives. That said, she directed me to a new release just posted to
their download section of their web site (v. 2.1d).
It took a number of attempts to nab the 1.9 MB file. Perhaps they need a faster server.
In any event, I disabled the active version of GoBack and applied the upgrade. While the
dialogue boxes were self-explanatory, I was puzzled and a little apprehensive about the
large number of reboots and messages I received. Finally, after applying some common
sense, I completed the upgrade. They need to work on this area to make it more intuitive
and friendly. When some application messes with my drive, I get nervous, and I fear I am
not alone.
The net of it is I deleted some files and quickly restored them with GoBack by simply
scrolling through a list of available files and double-clicking. Thus far the tool works
as it advertises.
The problem is I simply can not bring myself to deliberately hose my systems to test
this software, so my friends this evaluation is open ended and will be updated as system
problems provide new opportunities for GoBack to prove itself.
Which shouldn't be too long the way I load new software packages . . .
Later That Same Day . . .
Our Hero Hoses His System
Ooops. I knew I should not have loaded that software. It all started when I tried to
reload the old Win 95 MS-Fax components on a Win 98 2nd edition system. Even though I
pulled the instructions off Microsoft's own web site, something did not sit right about
mixing components between operating systems. I should have listened to my inner child.
After I realized I was hosed, I decided now would be a good time to try GoBack. I
clicked on the icon and scrolled through a vastly detailed log file of every single
programmatic action which had taken place since I first loaded GoBack. To make it easier,
I dragged the hands of the application's clock to 9:00 pm -- right about the time before I
screwed things up. There it was -- a safe system time. I clicked, and the system restarted
and began to reload an older disk image. In about three to five minutes my system was up
and running, back where it was BEFORE I screwed it all up. Perfect.
Well, maybe not perfect. My recently downloaded mail messages were gone -- I had pulled
them down at 10:30 pm so they never existed in my 9:00 pm image. Still, considering all
the hours it would have taken me to remove, reload and then test the system to get it back
to where it was before I had screwed it up -- well, you do the math. I'm sure you've said
"Ooops!" before. How much time did you spend repairing the problem? An hour? A
day? What was it worth to you?
After working with my GoBack system for a few hours, it is clear there are some
occasional degradations in system speed as GoBack not so silently logs everything you are
doing. Plenty of disk thrashing going on. A closer look at its log file, though, showed me
I had some funky programs running in the background which needed to be stopped and
deinstalled. So GoBack is also a good system analysis tool.
We did see minor some pecularities when running McAfee with GoBack. Apparently, SCAN
tries to read the GoBack cache file where your backup data is stored. The file on my
system was over 2 GB, so SCAN choked and produced an error message. Additionally, after
the upgrade to the latest version, we noticed a visible DOS box with SCAN running during
boot-up. This had to be exited manually. At the time of this writing, neither we nor the
GoBack tech support analysts know how to avoid this. But this may be a very small price to
pay for such power.
I can't say enough good things about this utility. It's kind of like a fire alarm. You
wouldn't want your children to burn to death in the event of a fire now would you? Well,
the same can be said for the critical data on your laptop. You wouldn't want to be without
your data when you needed it most, right?
GoBack is not a back-up program, so you'll still need to make regular back-ups of
critical data. But if you ever needed to go back in time, now you can, with your very own
time traveling software. Don't let this one pass you by.
Go Back gets our highest rating of four stars. Great idea which fills a niche, good
tech support, right retail price at $89.95 compared to the cost of a virus program.
For your convenience, you may order GoBack online through Beyond.com's online software
store at a considerable discount off list (as of 9/29/99 it was $47.99). Just click on the
image below to purchase GoBack:
Go Back
