PowerQuest DriveImage 5.0

In an ideal world you would use DriveImage to make an image of your data or your entire hard drive before you carry out a major system upgrade or software overhaul. The image can be placed on a separate partition within the same physical drive, on another drive or CD-R.

It is no bad thing to use DriveImage to back up your data on a regular basis, as there is never a good time to lose a month's work. Few of us remember to carry out that sort of housekeeping, so well thought out software makes life much easier. It is no surprise that version 5.0 supports Windows XP, but there are a few new features too.

DriveImage 5.0 is a serious overhaul of version 4.0, and the emphasis is on usability. This is welcome as version 4.0 functioned well, but it could be a pain to use. One annoying niggle was the way the utility boots into DOS before it runs to ensure system files are not in use.

The principle is very sound, but the downside is that drivers are not installed. This means that your USB mouse and keyboard will not work, and that your CD-RW may not function correctly.

One new feature is a Windows-based interface called QuickImage that allows the user to compile a list of tasks. These can be carried out immediately or scheduled to run periodically, say during the night.

Another feature is enhanced CD writing support to allow the image to be written to EIDE, SCSI or PC Card drives. Clearly you need to avoid trying to copy an entire 10Gb partition to a 650Mb CD-R.

PowerQuest has worked on the speed of image writing too. Previously this was heavily dependent on the speed of the drives themselves, but version 5.0 feels distinctly faster.

So here's the nub of the matter: backing up data or migrating from one drive to another can be a real pain but DriveImage 5.0 makes the job quicker and easier than before. Every hardcore PC user should have it in their toolkit.

Contact: PowerQuest 01189 450 200 www.powerquest.com

See also:

Retrospect Express BackUp

Avoid panic when your essential data goes AWOL by making regular backups.  15 Jan 2002

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