The SR system was designed to recover from a failure of the operating system, without the loss of data or even your desktop. It was a brainchild first setup for Windows 98(no longer supported) in 1999 and has been successfully used with the Windows 2K and XP operating systems. It has been used in home and small offices, along with the Corporate environment.One corporation stated that there savings on shipping alone more than defrayed the license fee. The systems were only returned because of hardware failures. The normal down time if setup per instructions is the amount of time it takes to reboot the system and on the "worst case scenario" about 1 hour.