Some readers will surely say, "What do I care about a virus or worm attack? That's what my restore and backup CDs are for!" And they would be right - as long as the incident occurs at home. But if you're on the road a lot with your laptop, chances are you don't always have your restore CDs with you. And even if you do, you've probably found that they often don't work as they are intended to. Worse, most recovery CDs only enable the system to be restored to its original factory settings, which means that all user data, custom settings and installed software is lost. This is usually not acceptable to most busy computer users.

Now let's be honest for a minute, folks. Who among us is actually disciplined enough to backup our data every single day? And even if you do, depending on the amount of data you're talking about, restoring can take up to an hour using one or more recovery or backup CDs.

Phoenix FirstWare Recover Pro 2004 will help save time in reconstructing your drive under most circumstances. There are two situations that it can't help, such as when the entire hard disk goes south or if you have made backups that include the seeds of your destruction (virus, OS corruption). For these situations, or where you want to do backups of servers, you might want to take a look at our review of three "bare metal" backup solutions . Let's show you how Recover Pro works.

Is the situation hopeless? No, because we have found a product that meets the needs we have described above, in terms of providing both automatic, regularly scheduled backup and fast recovery. Read on to find out more.