Roxio BackOnTrack3
$29.95
www.roxio.com
CPUs: 4

Getting people to back up their computers is like getting people to visit the dentist: Everyone knows they should do it, but they think they can get by without for years and years. Then the pain comes, and you either have lost your data or need a root canal; ouch. Roxio's BackOnTrack offers a relatively painless and inexpensive way to do both whole system backups, file-only backups, and even “restore points” that are much more thorough than what comes with Windows.

BOT3 makes a strong attempt to simplify what can be a complex task, but perhaps it goes a little too far. The Start menu, for example, has many icons (labeled Save State and Backup Drive, for example) that basically go to the same place: the BOT3 Home screen with a specific menu preselected. Bootable restoration discs are made automatically when making a disaster recovery disc set, but there’s no menu command to make one on its own (so start making a disaster recovery set and then cancel it after making a recovery disc).

These small hiccups aside, BOT3 works wonderfully. It backed up a test partition of 17GB in about as much time as Norton Ghost, both on a second internal drive or to a set of DVDs. It installs a bootable environment accessible via a boot menu to allow for disaster recovery should Windows become corrupted (though it failed to work on a Windows 98/XP/Linux multiboot machine—use the recovery disc instead).

Wizards make it easy to back up just your data files, either on a schedule or manually, and you can quickly back up just certain file types. You can even set the backup routines to run whenever a certain external drive is connected to your PC, which makes the process about as automatic as it can get.

Despite some minor interface problems, BOT3 is probably the backup solution that Microsoft should have built into Windows. For less than $30, there’s really no reason not to add it into your utility toolbox.

by Warren Ernst