Stellar Shield

BACKUP:  Ever get that panicky feeling when your computer system crashes while working on an important project report. Keeping a backup is the most effective tool of protecting yourself.

Look and Feel

Stellar Desktop Shield comes with four main components that work together to secure your PC.

Stellar Shield Scheduler: By default Scheduler is set to take an image of your system at startup, with the number of saved images varying from one to six. Time and frequency, at which these images are taken, can be set either daily, hourly, or at shutdown. There are four image type options available—‘Full’ incorporates the system area and complete sub directories of all logical drives. ‘Typical’ only includes the system area and the sub directory of Windows and My Documents. ‘Minimal’ takes an image of the system area with complete root directory information of all logical drives, and ‘Custom’ apart from the system area, it includes user specified sub directories. This is also where you are allowed to change your password, if your old one is compromised. A rescue disk can be created using only an obsolete 1.44 MB floppy disk.

Long Name File Converter: It takes a file with a short name and renames it with a long file name. You might wonder why anyone would need this utility. In the modern Windows environment renaming a file is as simple as right-clicking and selecting ‘Rename’. May we remind our users that the FAT16 based MS DOS OS file naming convention allows only a maximum of eight characters. Later operating systems, based on version FAT32 and above do not have the eight character limit restriction (they in fact have an upper limit of 255 characters) and thus a file name, for instance, ‘chipreader.dat’ in a FAT16 system will read ‘chipre‘1.dat’. So, after you use Stellar Shield to recover data from a FAT16 system, you can recover the original filenames using this utility.

Deleted File Recovery Tool: Using a hierarchy structure of the root directory of a drive, you can browse through and select the file that has been corrupted or is missing and restore it to its original form. Among the features available to help you in your file recovery process are the ability to recover all files and folders, recover selected files and folders, recover only deleted files and folders, and mask unwanted files and folders.

Take A SnapShot: It runs a snapshot tool to take an image of your current configuration of the system area and root folders. This is automatically stored in the default Stellar home directory.

Performance

Right after you install Stellar Shield on your desktop, it starts working to securing the data on your drive. First, it reads all the critical information from the logical drive and writes it to the Stelday File—it helps the Stellar application to reconstruct the system in the event of a disk crash. At this point you will be asked to set a password, from six to fifteen characters long. Make it strong as you wouldn’t want anyone or any unauthorized application to mess with any of the settings in future. In case you delete any important system files, or if something goes wrong with your system and it crashes after the un-installation procedure, you can easily and safely use Stellar to restore your PC to its last working state. An oddity here is that the rescue disk can only be made on a 3.5-inch disk, which is a little bizarre considering that many PCs nowadays are shipped without this drive.