Storage management vendor PowerQuest has introduced a new version of its point-in-time back-up and disaster-recovery software for servers and workstations that the company says will let customers quickly recover from failures caused by software and hardware errors, viruses or environmental conditions.

One of the most important enhancements included in V2i Protector 2.0 is the addition of snapshot back-up and recovery capability. Using a wizard-like interface, IT managers can determine how often snapshots - pictures of the disk contents - will be taken. At the scheduled time, the software saves the contents of the disk to a variety of media, including disk, tape, DVD and CD-ROM. In the event of a failure, users can restore corrupted data.

David Boosamra, IT administrator for Antidote Design, a production design studio in Tempe, Ariz., has used V2i Protector for snapshot backups.

"We were doing complete back-up images of critical data from Web servers to disk," Boosamra says. "Images are made of any write to the disk." He has 10 Windows 2003 servers and 20 workstations in his environment.

"We had a database corrupted - the good thing is it wrote before the machine crashed," Boosamra says. "[With V2i Protector], we were able to restore that database and it came back perfectly."

V2i Protector now works with Win 2003 and NT; it has worked with Windows 2000 and Windows Advanced Server. In addition, it supports Windows XP Professional and Win 2000 Workstation; and USB, DVD and FireWire devices.

The software competes with packages from Computer Associates, Ultrabac and Veritas Software, which offer server snapshot and point-in-time back-up capability. On the desktop, it competes with products from Altiris and Ultrabac.

PowerQuest's V2i Protector costs $995 per server and $79 per desktop. Users of Version 1.0 can upgrade for $495.