While Adaptec may be the company you think about more for CD-RW software than file protection and recovery, its GoBack software does a good job of the latter. This software integrates itself with Windows and runs in the background, keeping track of changes you make to the operating system--such as installing programs and creating documents--and allows you to return to a previous point in the event of trouble. While other programs offer similar protection, they rarely are able to do so as quietly as GoBack. After you install the program, you won"t even know it"s there until you need it. And GoBack allowed us to easily revert to previous states of our system or simply find a file that had accidentally been erased. We were able to use GoBack to restore our system after we downloaded and installed a program (the Winamp media player). GoBack walked us through the few simple steps of restoration--we scrolled through recent changes in our system and selected the System Safe Point to jump back to. GoBack restarted and completed the step backward and then our system had been neatly restored; the installation file we"d downloaded wasn"t even there anymore. Uninstalling the program may do the same in some situations, but uninstallers can often leave system files and other fragments that clutter up your system. GoBack"s restore was immaculate. GoBack also allows you to search through a monstrous list of changed files on your PC and view or restore ones that might have been erased or damaged--an excellent feature that anyone who has ever lost a document will appreciate immensely. Depending on how much space you allocate and how many major changes you make to your hard drive contents, GoBack can store several days or even weeks worth of safe points to return to. We found that GoBack had a hard time restoring when intensive drive changes were made--such as with a thorough scan disk or disk defragmentation--so you"ll want to ensure your drive is in the state you want to keep before conducting such activities. GoBack"s not inexpensive and it won"t protect you from everything. Since it"s integrated into the operating system, a major hard drive crash may prove too much for GoBack to recover from. But for those users who want more protection than the meager protocols included with Windows, GoBack is worth the cost. --J. Curtis