If you produce lots of media or important files on your PC, you may have experienced the heartbreak of your computer crashing with a BSOD (blue screen of death), or seeing your computer hopelessly disabled.

Result: You lose important data, graphics, and images. You cry, “Never again!” and proceed to purchase a backup software program.

Backup Your Files
What is a backup imaging program?

The theory is that if your physical drive goes to that big hard drive pile in the sky, you can still restore your computer exactly the way it was by installing the back up image to a new or existing drive.

In theory, this is what is supposed to happen. Unfortunately, the majority of software imaging programs do not work or can actually harm your computer.

Peace of Mind Equals ShadowProtect Desktop Edition
Enter Storagecraft’s backup-disaster recovery program, ShadowProtect. This software is aptly named because it does just that; it shadows everything on your desktop computer or laptop, and protects your files.

ShadowProtect is an easy to use program and also one of the most full-featured imaging software programs on the market.

It is deceptively simple to use, but so powerful that you’ll have peace of mind the first time you use it. A full listing of its benefits can be found by clicking here.

Installation
You can purchase the program by downloading or buying the DVD version.

The DVD version acts as a recovery disc, while downloading the program allows you to burn a recovery disc.

The recovery disc allows you to start your computer independently of your boot up hard drive, which means even if your computer is dead, the disc allows you to bring it to life again and run the recovery program.

A free 30-day trial of this program is fully functional except for the lack of the recovery disc. During the trial period you can buy the program and fully activate it.

Into the Abyss
We made the ultimate sacrifice to test the imaging properties of ShadowProtect. We overwrote our programs partition and essentially wiped it clean.

Many of the program files were system dependent. Prior to wiping out the drive, we made an image of the disk on a USB external hard drive.

We used the restore function through the recovery disc,  and a couple of minutes later the partition was fully restored.

(But one big word of caution: make certain you read the manual and understand how to use this program to avoid accidentally overwriting drives you don’t want to.)

We clicked on several shortcut links that led to our program partitions and each one worked flawlessly without receiving the “this program cannot be found or has moved…” error message.

You have the option of backing up entire disks or only certain volumes/partitions. ShadowProtect is fully configurable and can run silently in the background making incremental or differential backups of your hard drives even while you are working on your computer.

There are online tutorials and user guides on Storagecraft’s website and these are very helpful, if not somewhat technical in nature.

ShadowProtect: A David Among The Goliaths
There are big software companies that sell well known backup programs, but ShadowProtect out performs them all and does exactly what it promises to do.

Storagecraft may be a small company compared to the big dogs, but it is a giant as far as what it does.

Laura Shafer, Director of Public Relations at Storagecraft said:

“…with a lot of word-of-mouth and grassroots support, ShadowProtect has really taken off.

“We’ve especially had a lot of support from resellers and small to medium sized businesses because ShadowProtect is easy to use, extremely reliable and affordable.”

ShadowProtect is an excellent program and will pay for itself dozens of times over by giving you peace of mind even after a serious crash on your computer.

We give ShadowProtect our highest rating: 5 out of 5 pencils.

Click here to find out more about ShadowProtect.