CMS Products introduced the latest version of their BounceBack product, called BounceBack Ultimate which has some very interesting new features. As a couple of sys admins, we were impressed by what BounceBack is able to do, mainly backup an entire Windows 2000/XP/Vista system to an external hard drive and then boot off of that drive without any need for the internal drive.
BounceBack can be set to run continuously and it can back up everything – files, OS files, even the BIOS. CMS has figured out how to backup even OS-level files while running. The backed-up system is bootable from that external hard drive regardless of hardware and/or BIOS.
This certainly makes it a great deal easier for end users to get back to status quo should a hard drive or even other hardware corruption occurs, and gives them time to get the original hard drive replaced. The original hard drive doesn’t even need to be the same size as long as it exceeds the size of your data.
BBU also does versioning if you’d like, so you can snag older versions of files in case you messed up something and you can simply copy those directly from the backed up drive.