Thinkpads Forum

I had a problem recently after my T60 got infected with the Antimalware virus. When the virus first popped up I was able to reboot into safe mode and delete the windows registry entries and executables. When I rebooted I did a virus scan and everything looked fine. Then after opening Firefox a new virus showed up as Security Suite and Windows Defender. I tried repeating the last steps but after rebooting a couple times I was unable to get into Windows safe mode.

At this point I was ready to pull my files off the hard drive with a Linux Live CD, reformat and do a factory restore. I instead tried using R+R and was surprised to find that I was able to save files from the HDD to a USB stick without booting. Then I tried the recovery process and used the last saved backup from January. It worked fine and the virus was gone. I now need to learn a little more about R+R so the backups are not so old. I also need to develop a regular plan for backing up files and regularly do a system backup in case the whole HDD goes bad. All in all I am pretty happy with R+R, a feature I have never used before and always thought a relative waste of HDD space:D

R&R certainly helps, but Acronis TrueImage may be a better bet for backing up your hard disc as you can recover individual files, if needed, or simply reinstall the whole disc in one go. I do a full (rather than incremental) hard disc back up at the start of every month -with others in the month if I feel concerned.