The show ended Sunday. Here is the rest of what I saw at CES… To see more, visit Gadgetress@CES 2009

When a computer crashes, consumers bemoan the fact that they never backed up their photos, music and other valuable documents. No more!

CMS Products, based in Costa Mesa, announced a new fix at CES: Its “BounceBack Ultimate” software runs even if you don’t have a hard drive inside your computer. The company demoed the new software at CES by popping out a laptop’s hard drive and placing it on top so the computer was obviously running on the external drive:

Apparently, booting up a computer from a USB hard drive is difficult. CMS says this product is the first “commercially-available software product that enables computer users to instantly recover their PC following a hard drive ‘crash.’” The software stores (and backs up) all information on an external hard drive, which must be connected to the computer. The external drive can be from any company — not just CMS.

Whenever you restart your computer, it’ll ask whether you want to boot from the external drive or the computer.  If your computer suddenly stops working, a likely culprit could be a corrupt hard drive. So, select “external drive” when you boot up the computer, and you can begin the recovery process. The software will restore your computer’s hard drive to an earlier time when it was working properly. Also, make sure you have nothing on the external drive because BounceBack reformats the drive.

“BounceBack Ultimate” software is included with CMS’s external hard drives or you can purchase it for $99. It’s compatible with Windows XP. A Windows Vista version should be available in the next few weeks, according to the company. A trial version should be available. Check CMS’ site for details (the “Ultimate” version is not yet available on CMS’ web site, but here’s a link to BouceBack Pro). 

For the list of Gadgetress reports from CES, visit the headline page at gadgetress.freedomblogging.com/ces2009.