If you’ve ever needed to recover a corrupt Windows XP PC, you’ll probably have used the System Restore feature, which lets you return, or roll back, the OS to a previous, stable state.

Winternals Recovery Manager builds on this concept with tools to protect and recover almost any Windows PC or server remotely, and do so even if it’s completely unbootable.

Recovery Manager uses its own snapshot technology to capture recovery information from any version of Windows from NT onwards, storing the snapshots from multiple clients in a central SQL database – the recovery point store.

However, you don’t have to invest in a full SQL Server to use Recovery Manager as a copy of MSDE is included and installed along with the rest of the package. Plus, with the latest 3.0 release, you can now configure multiple file stores to, for example, speed up the recovery process in remote offices.

Support for 64-bit Windows is another important addition in Recovery Manager 3.0, and so is the ability to take snapshots of open files such as databases. Plus, there is a new bare metal recovery option to rebuild a complete PC or server from scratch.

It took us about five minutes to install Recovery Manager 3.0 on a server running Windows Server 2003 R2, after which we were able to configure schedules to take snapshots using the wizard supplied.

As the name implies, a schedule tells Recovery Manager when to take snapshots and what information to include. Basic system file and configuration data is always harvested, in addition to which you can choose to protect the Program Files directory, user Registry settings and even data files.

In fact, you can even protect all the files on client PCs. However, this will have a major impact on performance, and Recovery Manager shouldn’t be viewed as a backup alternative.

Schedules can be applied to individual PCs or groups on the network. These can be selected from a list. On networks running Active Directory, schedules can be assigned to Organisational Units (OUs) or complete domains. There’s also a Smartbind option to protect new PCs added to an OU after a schedule has been created.

It’s all fairly straightforward, although a small client agent does need to be installed before snapshots can be taken. This can be pushed out when the schedule is run but, depending on how the clients are configured, that doesn’t always work.

We had problems with desktop firewalls and client PCs, where administrative shares were disabled for security reasons. However, the software can be installed separately using third-party distribution tools or Windows Group Policy.

Once up and running, Recovery Manager is an easy application to use, with an intuitive Recovery Centre console from which you can selectively roll back and recover individual or multiple PCs, compare and explore stored recovery point data, and produce management reports. It also lets you edit Registries, reset passwords and make other client changes remotely.

Recovery Manager was a lot more reliable than XP System Restore, working on almost every PC we tried, even virtual ones and those with unformatted hard disks.

Of course, it takes time to set up, and snapshot data can take an age to collect. However, the built-in automation allows most of the preparation work to be done out of hours, and automated recovery is a lot faster than doing it by hand.

Winternals has now been bought by Microsoft, but no details are yet available on whether this will affect pricing or support.