Drive Image 7
Software Guide

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.

Drive Image 7.0 - Download and start using it Today!

PowerQuest Drive Image 7
Product description

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.

Drive Image 7 runs on Windows XP Home and Professional, as well as Windows 2000 Professional Desktop Version. Drive Image 2002 is included for users of Windows 95c, 98, ME and NT 4.0 Workstation. The purchase price includes both products.

Quickly prepare backup images
Back up your entire computer, including the OS, programs, files and settings. Scheduling allows you to choose to back up a drive immediately or lets you to schedule backups for the future and choose a regular schedule to repeat backups.

• Make backup simple with a user-friendly Windows interface and step-by-step wizards
• Save your backup to virtually any internal or external drive (CD or DVD burners, USB or FireWire devices, network locations)
• Schedule automatic backups for any time you select, view the backups you have scheduled and and view the history of backups completed on the drive
• Mount your backup as a driver letter for easy access
• Use “hot imaging” to create backups without ever leaving Windows

• Protect all the information on your computer, not just application files
• Compressed drive images saves valuable disk space

• Restore your entire system or just selected files – you choose
• Transfer all your data from one computer to another without hassle

Basic and advanced views
Drive Image includes two views. The basic view is the default and provides quick, easy access to the most commonly used Drive Image features. It incudes a menu bar, icons for common tasks and a shortcut for switching views.

The advanced view provides a quick overview of the drives on the machine, backup jobs you have created, the backup history for each drive, and Drive Image-related event messages. You can also perform some additional tasks from the advanced view that are not available from the basic view.

Copying drives
The Copy Drives feature helps you copy the contents of one hard drive to another. You can copy your operating system, applications, and data to a new hard drive. Copied partitions are expanded to occupy the same proportion of the new hard disk as they do on the original hard drive. For example, if you had two 1 GB FAT 32 partitions on a 2 GB hard disk and you copied both partitions to a new 8 GB hard disk, each partition would be expanded to 4 GB on the new hard disk. You can choose to copy an entire hard drive or selected partitions.

You can use the Copy Drives feature when you upgrade to a larger hard drive or when you add a second hard drive and keep the original. You should not use the Copy Drives feature to set up a hard drive that will be used in another computer.

DriveImage 7 Platforms

• Windows XP Home/Pro/2000 Pro Windows Me/98/98SE/95c/NT WS 4

• New imaging technology allows you to create and restore drive images while running in Windows*, unlike other desktop imaging solutions which require booting to DOS
• Easy-to-use, intuitive Windows interface
• Save your image files directly to another section of your hard drive by automatically creating a dedicated backup partition
• LAN support allows you to save hard drive images to, and restore from, a network drive
• New and improved online help. Quickly learn all the functions while walking through common backup scenarios

(REVIEW By September 2003's Computer Video magazine, Bob Crabtree)

Drive Image v.7 is claimed to be faster and more convenient and flexible than previous versions, being able to back up even boot disks over a network and to FireWire and USB drives. But can it live up to the hype?

PowerQuest's Drive Image hard disk back-up and restore program is one of CV readers' favourite Windows utilities. It's a simple-to-use safety net against disk failure and is also employed by reviewers (and system builders) as a fast and dependable way of restoring known good configurations onto boot drives on test PCs - to make the next hardware or software installation as hassle-free as possible.

Drive Image 2002 (review, Dec 2002, p74) was a significant improvement over V5, adding the ability to work with drives bigger than 80GByte, and to carry out a range of back-up tasks from within Windows that, in V5 and before, had required a reboot into DOS.
Where DI 2002 fell short, though, was in its inability to back up in a Windows environment any drive on which files are open. This means that backing up a boot drive still required a reboot into DOS - and the same was true for restoring. This was more than an irritation - drives don't work as speedily under DOS as they do under Windows, so even ignoring the delay for a reboot, the creation and restoration of drive images takes considerably longer under DOS. Backing up to network drives was also unnecessarily complicated and there was no support for backing up to DVD burners.

With Drive Image 7, PowerQuest appears, on paper, to have addressed all the biggest issues in V2002, and to be introducing a program that's far more convenient and flexible. Version 7 can back up any hard disk under Windows, even if it has open files - and even if it's a boot disk. Better still, the program can back up to (and restore from) external FireWire and USB drives - something that was beyond earlier versions because there are no DOS drivers for FireWire and USB. And, with V7, the program can back up to DVD.

But there's bad news, too. V7 only works under Win XP and 2K. That's because a lot of the clever stuff relies on Microsoft's .NET Framework being installed - and this won't run on Win 95, 98/SE, ME or NT. Oh, and at least 256MByte of RAM is needed to restore backups. Version 7 has lost one feature introduced in V2002 - the ability to non-destructively create a partition on the boot hard disk onto which a backup can be saved. But, in truth, a partition on the boot disk is about the worst possible place for it.

Plain daft
We also discovered that Drive Image 7 won't work reliably on PCs that boot into more than one operating system. That's plain daft, given that one of the key selling points of Drive Image's sister program, Partition Magic, is its ability to easily implement dual-booting. Information about this shortcoming is found only at the end of a read-me file that's buried within a sub-folder on the program CD and will be first seen by most users only at the point where the program finishes installing.

If a fix isn't made available, this limitation needs to be explained on the packaging, on the company's website and in its other publicity material - users with dual-boot systems may otherwise assume, because they've got good back ups, that they'll be able to restore from them - only discovering when an emergency arises that they can't.

Conclusion
Drive Image 7 comes with an inadequate printed manual and has some maddening foibles, notably the inability to work reliably on dual-boot systems or to allow browsing of multiple image files on removable media. These are things that PowerQuest ought to address, and quickly, but knowing the company's past reluctance to introduce intermediary fixes and point-revisions, we're not holding our breath.

Even so, in most ways, Drive Image 7 is a massive improvement over its justifiably popular predecessor. The ability to easily back up to (and restore from) virtually any drive, irrespective of how its connected, is a huge step forward. So, too, is the speed at which backups and restores take place, and the fact that the user can keep on working during the creation of backups - though we'd not recommend anyone edit video when this is happening.

There's long ceased to be any valid reason for not backing up important drives and data. But almost all excuses for users of Win 2K and XP are now blown away by the arrival of Drive Image 7, with its ability to take advantage of a wide range of affordable everyday technologies - giant-capacity hard disks, writable DVD, networking, FireWire, USB, SCSI and PCMCIA.

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