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Drive Image 2002

Looking for a quick way to backup data? Drive Image will do that and more, writes Dave Cook.

Drive Image 2002 is PowerQuest’s latest offering to the world of disaster recovery, and quick and affordable backup solutions. With its new interface and local area network (LAN) support, Drive Image 2002 lets you save an exact image of your hard drive: to another partition, across the network, or to an external media such as CD-R and CD-R/W.

There’s also a new limited partitioning capability, the perfect solution for anyone who deems disk partitioning to be one of the black arts. The feature creates its own dedicated backup partition. Thus, you can save image files to another section of your hard drive irrespective of whether you have a spare partition.

Restoring an image is also easy. For example, you can restore a full image, or you can browse for and restore individual files or folders from an existing image.

Devices

Drive Image supports a number of devices. You can save images to removable devices such as Jaz and Zip drives, as well as MMC2-compliant CD-R and CD-R/W drives. Assuming you have an IDE, SCSI, or SCSI PCMCIA CD-R or CD-R/W drive installed, you should be able to create and restore images directly from Drive Image.

It’s important to note, however, that USB/FireWire drives are only supported if Drive Image can create or restore an image directly through the Windows operating system.

If Drive Image has to execute the process in DOS mode, then support for USB and FireWire drives is dependent upon DOS drivers being installed for the said drives. Note also that dynamic disks are not supported. Nor should you save backup images on encrypted folders, or on NTFS compressed drives. Uncompressed NTFS drives are fine, of course.

Right Image

New wizards are available to create, save, and restore images with the minimum of fuss. A user guide is also included, although it’s disappointingly thin compared to the usual PowerQuest offering.

Most images can be created and restored directly from Windows. Be warned, though, that if you elect to backup your entire operating system to the same hard disk, you must save the image to a partition not included in the image.

This is no longer a problem, though, since the Setup Wizard now walks you through the process of creating a new backup partition. Indeed, it will help you select an existing partition. Scheduled backups are also possible on systems installed with Windows Task Scheduler.

Disk Copying

If your PC is more than a year old, your hard disk is probably filling up faster than a fat cat politician’s pension fund. The trouble is, transferring everything onto a newer, bigger, and faster hard disk can be time-consuming.

But not if you use Drive Image’s Copy Drives feature. This is a nifty little tool that lets you make an exact copy of a partition or an entire hard disk. Numerous options are available including the ability to hide the source drive afterwards, or to check for file system errors, or to verify disk writes.

Verdict

Drive Image remains a fast, efficient way to backup all or part of a disk drive. Moreover, thanks to a set of new wizards, Drive Image is now easier to use than ever.

Dave Cook

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