When I think of system recovery, I think of the times which in which I have had to spend countless hours trying to fix and re-install my computer. I had always wished if someone would come up with an easy solution besides having to backup my system. Well, you guessed it, someone did. In this review, I will take a look at MagicCard, a system recovery based on hardware that can restore your computer in seconds.

When I received my MagicCard, I was surprised at the size of the card – no bigger than your hand but it claimed that it could save my system from viruses, easy to setup, fast system restores, secure and allows fast network copy of profiles. It was too good to be true.

Installation

The card is tested and certified to run on all versions of Windows up to Windows 2000. The company is currently working on new drivers for WindowsXP. Nonetheless, I followed the installation instructions that come with the hardware to install a small 5KB driver to Windows 2000. Then, I opened my PC case and found a free PCI slot in which to install the card. Unlike other PCI cards, there was no need to screw and secure the device. It was just a simple plug and play the case type of scenario.

When the system was powered own the first time, the card presented me with a whole series of options including the option to protect up to 8 partitions. The maker recommends that you move all your data away from your operating system partition unless you want lose any and all new data stored.

The system booted and worked without any problems. I proceeded to perform some changes by adding a wallpaper and rebooted the system. To my amazement, the wallpaper was gone. The next step involved booting from DOS in order to use the ‘fdisk’ utility to wipe the hard drive clean. Confident that the operating system was pretty much gone, I rebooted. I was shocked to see that it, once again, rebooted.

How Can This Be?

The card works by taking your data and stores it in binary code into your hard drive thanks to what MagicCard calls the “dynamic buffer”. The data takes no more than 1% of your hard drive.

Unlike other solutions, the card doesn’t replicate your data into another hidden file. Instead, it stores the allocation table’s data into this “dynamic buffer” as zeroes and ones. As a result, once you have taken a snapshot, (whether it’s each time the systems shuts down or once a week) you will always revert back to your snapshot.

The important thing is have an operating system installation which is clean, free of problems because you want to make sure that your operating system is working 100% each time your bring it back from its original snapshot.

Conclusion

Overall, this is an amazing product. I approached this card with a skeptical view and came out convinced that this card will save you time and money. Companies and public access PCs can ensure that users will never bring down or destroy and operating system which will then will have to be completely restored by a technician. Large corporations, which have for years tried to get their employees to stored their data on corporate servers will have no choice but to do it if they don’t want their data lost when the come in to work the next day.

Do bear in mind, however, that this product is NOT meant to protect your data. It’s meant to be an easy way to store systems back to their original state without using traditional backup solutions such as Roxio’s GoBack, Symantec’s Ghost and many others.

The only drawback I saw is on the fact that the card will not work on WindowsXP. However, the company is working a new driver as we speak.

MagicCard: System Recovery in Seconds Developed by: MagicCard Published by Price: $119 Rating: 5 out of 5