PowerQuest Drive Image 5

PowerQuest is getting quite a reputation for its hard disk utilities as they're fast becoming standard setters. The latest PartitionMagic 7 (see p204) is the tool of choice for partition management, while Drive Image 5 looks to be one of the top personal disk-imaging solutions on the market. This latest version enhances support for CD-RW drives and adds PCMCIA drives to the list, allowing images to be created on and restored from a wider range of devices. There's much more, as Drive Image can use hard disks of up to 80Gb capacity, the installation CD-ROM has been made bootable and Windows XP is supported.

During the imaging process, Drive Image must have exclusive access to the hard disks so it can only be run once the system has been booted to DOS. Essentially, any storage device that DOS can assign a drive letter to can be used by Drive Image. A utility is provided that creates a pair of rescue disks for this purpose and it can also install and load drivers for Iomega devices and Fujitsu MO (magneto optical) drives so they can be used when the system is rebooted into DOS. However, experience has shown that these ready-made boot disks often fail to work and usually require some manual intervention. If you're planning on using CD-RW drives, the boot disks must load the supplied PQPACKET utility before the devices can be used. Furthermore, the drives must be MMC2 compliant, otherwise they won't be recognised. A list of compatible devices is maintained on PowerQuest's Web site, so check it out before buying.

The DOS Drive Image interface is very simple to use, with three options provided for creating or restoring images and copying images from one drive to another in the same PC. The latter option comes into its own when you're upgrading to a larger hard disk as you can clone the original drive across to the new one and be back up and running in minutes. To create an image, you select a drive and partitions, pick a destination and choose a compression level of up to 50 per cent. When restoring images you can select a Safe Mode that checks the hard disk during the restore to ensure data is being written to it correctly. You can also resize the destination partitions to suit or leave Drive Image to modify them automatically to take up any remaining space. Overall speed is impressive, with an image of a 2Gb partition on a Windows ME test system created in only five minutes.

The fact that Drive Image must run in DOS can be a nuisance as you have to reboot your PC every time you want to use the software. The new QuickImage utility provides some relief as it allows you to generate image-creation jobs from within Windows and schedule them to run at a convenient time. Don't be fooled into thinking that the imaging process can be run from Windows as well - all QuickImage does is reboot the system at the appointed time, run the specified job and return the system back to Windows on completion. Even so, it could prove extremely useful if you want to use imaging as a method of backing your data up, as jobs can be scheduled to run when your PC isn't being used. Having said that, I'm still not convinced these types of utilities are the best choice for backup. Storage demands for images are fairly high even when compression is being used, and I've also had the occasional problem restoring from images on Jaz drives where data errors have made the backup useless. The bundled DataKeeper software looks a better bet as it monitors selected hard disks and automatically creates a backup every time any changes are identified. You choose the folders you want monitored and select a primary destination where the backup is to be created and these can be either local, network or removable drives. A secondary backup location can also be specified, which will be used if the primary destination becomes unavailable. Once monitoring has started, DataKeeper will immediately update the backup with any files that are created or modified. Files are easily restored by viewing the contents of the active backup and selecting those you want returned to their original locations. Potential Windows XP users should be aware that DataKeeper doesn't currently support this OS.