New XP security upgrade could trash your systems
Warning: Microsoft says security enhancements in Windows XP’s Service Pack 2, expected this month, could break some applications. Analysts expect as many as 25% to 50% of you will suffer locked or damaged upgrades. If you draw the short straw, your only hope is a back-up system with bootable recovery disks. There are plenty of options, including two good ones from Iomega and Acronis.
Warning: Microsoft says security enhancements in Windows XP’s Service Pack 2, expected this month, could break some applications. Analysts expect as many as 25% to 50% of you will suffer locked or damaged upgrades.
If you draw the short straw, your only hope is a back-up system with bootable recovery disks. There are plenty of options, including two good ones from Iomega and Acronis.
Iomega’s 35G-byte Zip Disk, the Iomega REV, is small, fast and quiet, and comes with versatile back-up tools and Symantec Norton Ghost disk-cloning software.
First, let me rave about the REV hardware. The external USB 2.0 box I tested is slightly smaller than the old ZIP disk drives, and costs $400 retail. There are also Firewire external and internal versions. Disks cost $60 each, less, if you buy a four pack.
The REV disk looks like a makeup compact and holds up to 35G bytes of standard files. Iomega says it can hold 90G bytes of compressed files, but I didn’t test that. But I did back up a 4.6G-byte data partition onto the disk in less than 25 minutes, much faster than any tape drive I know.
Four default mouse clicks installed the Iomega Automatic Backup Pro software and Ghost. Unfortunately, you can’t back up the root of a drive (like my D for Data drive partition), as some software allows, but everything else worked great. Initially, I configured the system to back up files whenever they changed. This worked great for documents, but not for big e-mail and Personal Information Manager database files. Those bogged down the system each time I deleted spam or changed my calendar, so now I back them up at midnight.
Two advantages to the REV drive for backups: You can copy and keep an unlimited number of file revisions, and the tiny drive slips easily into a shirt pocket for carrying offsite. Iomega sets a default number of five revisions, but you can set the number from 2 to unlimited.
Now onto the software option. Acronis released Version 8 of its True Image software at the end of July. A competitor to Ghost, True Image also manages incremental backups and creates bootable rescue disks — just what you need to recover from an upgrade mishap. To test it, I copied my PC’s primary disk (C:) to a file on that same disk, then recovered the partition back to its original state after mucking it up. Acronis also handles network drive storage, but I just played with the single PC recovery features. True Image starts at $49.
I can’t stress it enough: You will need backups before installing Windows XP Service Pack 2. I don’t care what you use, but you must use something, and these products are good options if you’re currently backup-deficient.
