Black Cat Stellar Shield 3.0

A data recovery cum anti-virus combo that's good for Windows desktop and laptop users for quickly recovering deleted files, but could do with better external storage support and in rebuilding deleted partitions

Saturday, November 01, 2008

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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 critical 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 floppy 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 2 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 MBR 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.

K7 AntiVirus
This is an anti virus solution from K7 which helps you protect your PC from trojans, viruses, Internet worms and harmful scripts. This is just a basic anti-virus and doesn't have any other features like anti-spam, personal firewall, etc. The user friendly interface guides you to perform different actions and configure the scanning as per your wish. It also gives you the flexibility to scan particular drives/folders unlike in Norton 360. Once installed, it scans every file that is opened or executed, thus ensuring that no infected file if found can affect the system. Apart from this, it scans e-mails and Instant Messaging attachments. We did wish that this anti-virus also had firewall support as well, but then it's not a major concern if you're happy with your built-in Windows based firewall.

We tested this software on a Windows XP machine containing viruses and malware. During scan, it detected almost all the viruses. It was not able to detect viruses present in compressed files, but when we tried to extract them it did raise an alarm.

Other antivirus software we've reviewed in the past, e.g. QuickHeal were able to detect viruses even within compressed files. RAM consumption of this software as compared to Norton 360 was considerably lower, and it did not slowdown the PC as was the case with Norton 360.

Bottomline: A good combo pack for personal use, barring a few glitches that we hope will be rectified in the next release.

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