Description:
With viruses attaining record levels of heinousness almost daily, good backup practices have become absolutely essential. PowerQuest's Drive Image makes it easier to package the entire contents of a hard disk (or some portion thereof) into a single file, which you can then store on another hard disk or some sort of removable media (such as a Zip disk). Drive Image also will read the files it creates and use them to restore drives to their backed-up state after a problem has occurred. If you use it regularly, Drive Image provides the kind of comprehensive failure protection that can save you tons of time in an emergency. Starting the program from our Windows 98 desktop didn't work; the program's need to run in a DOS environment conflicted with the notebook's power-management system and caused the machine to shut down. To test Drive Image, we set it up to take a snapshot of a notebook computer's data partition and store the resulting image file on another partition. (In the test, the partitions were on the same physical disk, but it would have been just as easy--and in fact a good idea--to store the image file on a separate unit.) It took about three minutes to store 400 MB of data in an image file without compression, though the software does offer compression if you're more concerned about the space your image files will occupy than about the time it takes to create them. Continuing with the test procedure, we deleted some files from the imaged partition to simulate a problem, then ran the Drive Image restore utility. It asked where to put the files stored in the image and added them back on the "damaged" partition. The process was speedy (again, about three minutes) and easy to perform. The test computer wasn't equipped with any high-capacity removable-media drives, but Drive Image ships with drivers for Iomega Zip and Jaz drives as well as for Syquest drives. The program won't write to recordable CD-ROMs directly, but you can use a CD-ROM writer program to burn an image file onto a CD-ROM and later restore from that CD-ROM, provided you have the proper DOS drivers. Drive Image runs as a DOS program because DOS, as a non-multitasking operating system, does not allow multiple files to be open simultaneously. As a result of this engineering decision, users of Windows NT must take care to install Drive Image to a FAT-formatted partition and boot to DOS before they use the program. Windows NT users also can install the software on floppies. By the same token, Drive Image works on nonbooting NetWare, Linux, and Unix disks. --David Wall
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