News

Winternals Product Expands on System Restore

• By Scott Bekker
• April 09, 2003

Winternals launched an administrative tool for recovering failed servers and desktops that is modeled after Microsoft's Windows XP System Restore technology but takes the capability further.

With Windows XP, Microsoft introduced an easy-to-use capability called System Restore for users to take a point-in-time snapshot of a machine's system and configuration files. If the user then installed an application or made some other change that crashed the system, the user could roll the system back to its last Restore Point.

Winternals is turning the concept into an administrative tool with Winternals Recovery Manager. The Winternals product extends the Windows XP functionality by adding cross-platform support, allowing for the restoration of unbootable systems, centralizing storage of system configuration files, giving control to remote administrators and allowing all systems on a network to be managed and configured from a central console.

"Recovery Manager addresses a missing -- and critical -- aspect of traditional techniques of restoring failed systems from backup images. It focuses the power of accelerated recovery directly on the operating system, where the vast majority of availability issues arise," Edwin Brasch, president and CEO of Winternals, said in a statement.

The tool allows an administrator to schedule Recovery Points for individual or multiple computers across the network. The administrator can then roll the system back to a recovery point if the system fails. Winternals positions the technology as a quickie alternative for the more time-consuming re-imaging and restoring of systems from backup media in the majority of cases.

The product, available immediately, can be licensed on a per-server, per-workstation or per-administrator basis.