OStatic

Information Week has an interesting piece up about open source disaster recovery tools. It covers a lot of the good applications that can come to the rescue when you need to recover data or revive a computer. They include SystemRescueCD, BackTrack, Partedmagic, TestDisk and more. In addition to these open source tools, there are also a number of great freeware products in this general category, especially for preventative maintenance. Here are five of them, with a couple of open source gems thrown in, that can help you avoid disaster.

For Windows users, Glary Utilities isn't an open source product, but it is an outstanding piece of freeware. It provides a whole suite of tools for protecting and optimizing a computer. For example, on Windows systems, it's very important to regularly clean your registry. Glary Utilities has an automated and very respected registry cleaner.

With Version Tracker you can do a free scan to see if any of your drivers are out of date, which some of them probably are, and get recommendations for which driver updates you need. This is good preventative maintenance.

There are a lot of computers out there with malware present, when the owners don't know about it. For Windows, it's worth running Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool to get rid of what you definitely don't need.

PC Tools Antivirus is award-winning freeware security software, and Clamwin Free Antivirus is a good open source offering in the same category.

Network Security Toolkit is actually an amalgamation of many open source applications for securing a network. It's based on Fedora, but is OS independent and will run on most x86 platforms without a hitch. It does intrusion detection, wireless network monitoring, and more.

• Windows
• linux
• Network Security Toolkit
• ClamWin Antivirus
• PartedMagic
• TestDisk
• SystemRescueCD