Stellar has launched a 'pre-crash' data protection software -'Black Cat Stellar Shield 3.0'. It also comes bundled with K7 anti-virus. After installation, the software takes a snapshot of cri tical system information and files and stores them in a hidden area of the hard disk as images. Capturing these snapshots can be automated through its scheduler, which gives users the freedom to choose the files/drives for taking images.

We did wish the system could backup the snapshots to an external storage such as a USB device or a network drive. because if the images get formatted or corrupted by accident or a virus attack, then it can improve chances of data retrieval.
Blackcat only works with Windowsand provides two recovery options: GUI and DOS based. GUI based recovery is obviously simple and easy to use, and is useful if nothing major has gone wrong with the system. and you just need to recover some accidentally deleted files.



If a complete drive fails. then the system can be booted using the Blackcat disk in DOS mode. This is supposed to enable you to either rebuild the drive or recover files from the hard disk. Files that you recover can be sent to a fioppy drive or an external hard drive which has a valid FAT partition. Here again, we wished the software would let you restore files to a USB or network drive. or at least support other partition formats like FAT32 or NTFS.

We tested this software on a Windows XP machine. The GUI recovery tool was quite easy to use and we were able to retrieve 1 GB of data that we deleted in less than minutes. So as long as your Windows is running, recovering accidentally deleted files is a piece of cake with this software.

We then tested the software for rebuilding drives. For this, we deleted a partition using fdisk, and then booted the machine with the Stellar disk. All data remained intact, and we were able to recover it. However. it was not able to recover the lost partition. rebuild the MER and boot Windows from it. This was a little disappointing because the software's manual clearly mentioned that it was possible. We've tested other Stellar products before, but never faced this problem. Possibly Stellar will fix it in their next release.