ALBack (알백)

» see altools.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ESTsoft built this one against a deadline that belonged to Microsoft. Windows XP was being wound down while a large share of Korean home machines were still running it, and in April 2011 the company shipped a recovery tool whose first version ran on nothing else: Windows XP, 32-bit only. The chief executive, Kim Jang-jung, said at the launch that it would cut the time and the cost of putting a broken PC back together. The version history on the download page carries a single entry, 알백 v1.0 XP beta, dated 13 April 2011. ESTsoft never added a second line to it in four years, though the product itself went on shipping and died at version 3.0.

What it did was narrower than backup and a good deal more violent. ALBack held one saved state of the C: drive rather than a set of them, and restoring meant returning the whole partition to that single moment and destroying everything written since. It worked underneath the file system. The product page promised that even the defragmentation state of the drive came back, which is the detail that gives the mechanism away: this was operating on sectors, not on your documents. Installing it switched Windows System Restore off, because the two could not both own the disk.

The pitch was aimed at a habit, and the habit was not only Korean. 이제는 포맷대신 알백 하세요, said the download page, from now on ALBack instead of formatting. In Turkey the answer to a Windows install that had gone slow or strange was that same evening of work. You moved whatever you cared about onto a second drive and then spent the night putting the machine back from installer disks. ALBack was selling a way out of that evening for 6,600 won, in a currency and through a payment desk that nobody outside Korea was going to reach.

~ the record ~

~ one snapshot, and nothing before it ~

The list of machines it refused to install on is the clearest description of the thing. Nothing newer than Windows 7. No multi-boot setup. Windows had to sit on C: and C: had to be the boot drive. The disk had to be smaller than two terabytes, which is the ceiling of the old MBR partition scheme, and TRIM had to be switched off, which in practice ruled out solid state drives.

One more warning on that page explains the engine better than the marketing did. Move an ALBack disk into a different computer, it said, and files written after the installation could be lost. They were living in redirected sectors that only ALBack's own driver knew how to find, so the disk was legible as a whole only on the machine that had made the snapshot.

~ the phone call from dos ~

A telephone number carried the rest of it. If Windows would not start you held down the HOME key during boot and ALBack came up in DOS mode, underneath the operating system, with no network available to it. There was no way to take a card payment in that state, so ESTsoft ran a recovery line, 1666-3772, answered around the clock, and you authorized the restore by calling it and reading out what it asked for. The restore itself finished on the next reboot and took about three seconds.

That constraint is also why the pricing was shaped the way it was. Installing ALBack cost nothing and went on costing nothing for as long as you left it in place. The 6,600 won bought one restore and was charged at the moment you needed one, which made it less a piece of software than a policy taken out against your own hard disk. The alternative was an annual pass at 16,000 won for unlimited restores, and it could be bought in exactly one place: AlYac Ansim Care, ESTsoft's paid remote-support service.

~ what the notice actually says ~

ESTsoft posted the closing notice on 31 July 2015 under the title 알백 서비스 종료 안내, ALBack service termination notice, and the body of it is more careful than its own title. The verb 종료, the one that means a service has ended, attaches to two selling dates: the annual pass came off sale on 1 August 2015 and the single-restore ticket on 1 October. The third date is a different sentence. 알백 고객센터 운영 중단, 2015년 10월 30일. That verb is 중단, cessation, and what it governs is the operation of the customer center.

Korean Wikipedia gives 30 October 2015 as the day the service ended and cites this notice as its authority, which is a reading the notice will not carry. What ESTsoft dated there was the closing of a phone room. The moment restores actually stopped working is written down nowhere I could reach. I have used 30 October anyway, because it is the last dated event the company published, and because for a product you operated by telephone from a machine that could not boot, that phone room was the service. Annual-pass holders were refunded in full whatever portion of the term they had used, with the window open until 31 July 2016.

~ what the suite kept ~

ALTools published a rule for its retired products: technical support runs for two years from the day sales end. ALBack's sales ended on 1 October 2015 and its support ended on the 30th, twenty-nine days later. No Korean technology outlet seems to have written a word about it. The 2011 launch was covered in the trade press, the closure was announced on a notice board and nowhere else, and the dedicated product page had already been quietly folded into the plain download page back in March 2014.

Windows XP reached the end of its support on 8 April 2014. ALBack had been built for the people who stayed on it and outlived that by eighteen months, still refusing to install on a solid state drive. It was also the only program in the AL family that ever asked for money, inside a suite whose entire identity was that it was free and carried advertising instead, and it is the one that got dropped. The icon is still being served: images.altools.co.kr answers with alback.jpg, 200 pixels square, the AlTools egg clutching a clock, years after the last copy was sold. Every product page underneath it returns 404.

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