Description:
In hard disk drive cloning, there are two household names: Norton Ghost and PowerQuest Drive Image. While Ghost, with its wide range of drive cloning and imaging capabilities, is by far the more popular program, the latest version of Drive Image includes enough useful and compelling features to turn this into a real competition. Intended not as a file-by-file backup solution but as a complete fail-safe solution, Drive Image creates a duplicate of your entire hard disk drive. Among its new features Drive Image 5.0 offers QuickImage, a program that allows some backup and restoring to be done through Windows, including browsing through the contents of an image and restoring individual files. Still, most imaging must be done in pure DOS mode. Drive Image handles the transition gracefully; if it can't create an image through QuickImage, it gives you the option of restarting in DOS mode. (And yes, it can even run in DOS mode in Windows XP.) The new version also recognizes a host of media on which to save images, including CD-RW drives, SCSI drives, and PCMCIA drives. As with most drive-image programs, you cannot save a recursive image to the drive partition of which you are creating an image. That means you'll need large media (depending on the size of the partition you're imaging) to save a drive image. We tested with a second hard disk drive and with a CD-RW drive. Drive Image 5.0 worked seamlessly in both cases. For extreme cases of hard disk drive failure, you can boot your PC with the Drive Image CD-ROM and start a restore from its interface. Drive Image 5.0 also includes PowerQuest DataKeeper, an automated partition-imaging program. It allows you to determine which partition, drive letter, or set of files is most important to keep backed up, and it even monitors them for changes so it can create new backups when you've updated a particular file. Best of all, version 5.0's image-creation routine is much faster than previous versions. What once used to take hours now takes only half-hours. Restoring files is equally swift, and unless you're restoring an entire partition, the process can be done right in Windows. Drive Image 5.0 is packed with features and, in our tests on Windows XP and Windows Me systems, they all functioned flawlessly. It's a robust drive-imaging program that almost makes us comfortable with the idea of setting aside our copy of Norton Ghost. --Joel Durham Jr.
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