Drive Image v4.0 - PowerQuest

                      Reviewed by Sue

A few months ago, as I mentioned In SynTax at the time, I switched
on my PC and it made a sound like 'pock' ... and died.  Yes, the
hard drive had gone to the big scrap heap in the sky. It had done
very well, and fortunately my data was safe on another drive from
which I back it up each week. But as always it was most
inconvenient to lose all the programs and Windows settings etc
which were on the C drive. Okay, I could reinstall them but that
takes time which I'm always really short of. Plus at the time I
was just going on holiday AND I was in the process of installing
2000 on my main computer, so it was a case of ... why me? And why
now?

Alex had told me about Norton Ghost which will make an image of
the whole of your drive, including all the settings, so that if
you had a crash, or Windows stopped working, you could go back to
a previous saved version. This sounded a great idea and luckily
that weekend there was a computer fair at Swanley so I high-tailed
it up there and had a rummage. Not only did I find Ghost, but I
also found Drive Image and since I've never been very keen on
Norton's products but I like PowerQuest's (Partition Magic is a
brilliant program), that was the one I grabbed. It was about œ40.

I must admit that I haven't tested out all the features of the
program, but now at the start of each month, I have diligently
backed up the C drive on both computers and the G drive on the
main one too which is my Windows 2000 partition. I haven't yet had
to restore a drive but I know that if Windows started playing up,
or I needed to put in a new hard drive, the most that I would lose
would be my last month's installed programs. That gives me immense
peace of mind.

You may be put off by the thought that your hard drive is too
large to be sensibly backed up, but Drive Image offers excellent
compression rates from none to high. It works very quickly too.
There is an option to back up directly to a CD and the program
will, if instructed, slice the image into CD-sized 650 meg chunks.
This what I started doing but as I only have a CD writer on the
'old' PC, I had to use the network card to pump the file over from
the main PC and that took flippin' ages. The other way is to back
up onto a different partition on the hard drive, so now I'm doing
that on both machines and just keeping the last two backups.

You can also write direct to a Jaz or Zip drive but that sounds
like an awful lot of 100 meg disks to me. No, I'll stick to my
spare partition.

Fortunately I haven't yet had to restore my hard drive but if/when
the time comes I see no reason why restoring shouldn't work as
well as the actual backing up. You can restore individual files as
well as the complete drive, so the whole system is very flexible.

In conclusion then, peace of mind in terms of the contents of my
hard drive was well worth œ40 but fingers crossed that I never
have cause to test Drive Image out completely!

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