Amazon.co.uk Review
PowerQuest's
DriveImage is probably the best-known backup and data security product around. The new version works under Windows with a wide range of media types.
DriveImage 7.0 does pretty much what it says on the box: it creates images of the contents of your drives, compresses them and saves them in case of disaster. Should you have drive or system failure, you can reinstall an image created by the program onto a new volume and everything about your old system should still be intact: programs, data files, settings; even the way you've laid out your desktop.
DriveImage 7.0 of the program works mainly under Windows. This is where you create the image to back-up the entire drive, not just selected data. Restoration involves using the DriveImage 7.0 CD to start up the PowerQuest Recovery Environment (PQRE) and reinstate the drive from its image.
Both back-up and restore operations are Wizard-driven, and the back-up Wizard leads you step by step through selecting the drive you want to image, the place you want to put the image and the level of compression. A drive image can be less than half the size of the drive it represents and DriveImage 7.0 is intelligent enough to include only areas of the disk that contain data.
Creating an image is comparatively quick with (in our tests) 3.2 GB of data on a 5 GB drive compressing to 2 GB and taking under 12 minutes to save to a Peerless Firewire external hard drive.
There are a couple of things of particular note regarding DriveImage 7.0. Firstly, it requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 Professional to run. If you're running an earlier version of Windows, you must use DriveImage 2002, a copy of which is included in the DriveImage 7.0 box, but you miss out on many of the features of the newer product.
Secondly, you need 256 MB of main memory. Although you can run the program in 128 MB and save a drive image, you need the extra memory whenever you restore an image to your system. Your PC must also be able to start up from a bootable CD to run the PQRE from the DriveImage 7.0 disc.
With those two provisos, DriveImage 7.0 is certainly easier to use than its predecessors, and the ability to save images to external drives or network volumes is a big bonus. --Simon Williams
Manufacturer's Description
Drive Image 7 is the premier backup solution for total protection and peace of mind for your home PC.Every computer is vulnerable to data loss caused by viruses, faulty software or hard drive failure. PowerQuest's Drive Image provides a complete backup solution, saving you hours of frustration when inevitable failures happen. With your operating system, programs and settings as part of one backup file, you can have your computer up and running again in a matter of minutes.Drive Image 7, the premier backup solution, is a fast, inexpensive, and complete hard drive imaging solution. Unlike file-by-file copying utilities, Drive Image uses SmartSector imaging to create an exact image of a hard drive or partition where your operating system, applications and data resides.With Drive Image, you can create and restore a compressed image file of an entire hard disk or individual partitions of a hard drive. Because Drive Image uses SmartSector imaging, your Windows optimizations are preserved when you restore an image.Ready to buy a larger hard drive or upgrade to a new computer? Drive Image 7 makes it easy to transfer everything on your old drive to your new drive. You gain the benefits of a better system, without the hassle of reinstalling everything. And, with Drive Image's easy-to-use wizard interface, you can perform the entire process in a matter of minutes.
