BackOnTrack 3.0

Backing up may be hard to do, to paraphrase Neil Sedaka, but Roxio's BackOnTrack aims to ensure that you have all the tools you need to save your data in the event of disaster. It's true that Microsoft's NTFS file system does a much better job of maintaining the integrity of data on your hard drive these days, meaning system crashes are becoming much rarer, but if you need more than System Restore to protect your files, this will do the job.

There are three components to BackOnTrack: Instant Restore (a beefed-up version of Windows System Restore); File Backup (to preserve individual documents); and Disaster Recovery. Instant Restore is likely to be the most valuable as it can return your PC to an earlier state with a single mouse-click. One virtue of this over System Restore is that it can work if Windows crashes, even without a boot disk.

File Backup is fairly standard, but simple to use, providing the ability to specify individual documents and folders to back up to an external device. Backups can be scheduled and allocated to categories (such as photos or music). A useful addition is the ability to encrypt backups.

Disaster Recovery uses disk-imaging technology to create a backup of the entire PC which, as with alternatives such as True Image and Ghost, can back up and restore without requiring a system restart.