Price:
The street price for Drive Image 7.0 is about $59.

System Requirements:

Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home or Professional. For Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0 Workstation, install and use enclosed Drive Image 2002. Pentium 150 MHz or faster, RAM-256 MB,  45 MB for program files, CD or DVD drive. To see a list of supported drives, go to www.powerquest.com/driveimage  The latest version of the Microsoft .NET Framework must be installed prior to installing and using Drive Image.  You will be prompted to do so during the installation.

PowerQuest Corporation, P.O.Box 1911, Orem, Utah 84059-1911, U.S.A.  Tel:-801-437-8900  E-mail magic@powerquest.com    

Support: Complimentary e-mail and self-help support available at www.powerquest.com/support and free telephone technical support until after the release of the next major version of the product.  

Drive Image 7.0

By John C. Lee  

Drive Image 7.0 is a disaster recovery and backup application developed by PowerQuest Corporation specifically for Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems.  Drive Image 7.0 does not support Windows 9x, Windows Me or Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.  However, the program CD includes a previous version, Drive Image 2002. For users of those Windows versions, the CD automatically installs Drive Image 2002.  

PowerQuest did an excellent job in creating this version of Drive Image. Not only have they succeeded in making this version a completely Windows-based program, after almost a decade, but also have organized the program material so well as to make the program extremely easy to install and easy to use.The two audio-video presentations, Product Tour and Tutorial, included in the program CD give a very comprehensive and concise description of the program content. The user does not even need to peruse the printed Quick Start Guide or the online User Guide.  

Earlier versions of Drive Image up to Version 5 were all DOS-based. To run Drive Image, you had to close all of your active applications and the Windows operating system, and reboot to DOS. This was necessary, because Drive Image could only make a backup image of the partition when all the files were closed in the partition. This did not present a problem if you backed up a partition that did not contain the operating system. You could always shut down all the applications without shutting down the operating system. But if you had to backup a partition containing the operating system, which always has open files running, closing them forced Drive Image to boot out to DOS. While DOS is also an operating system, it is simple enough to run without any open files on the hard disk. Hence, running these early versions of Drive Image under DOS was the only logical way to make a backup image of the drive.  

Drive Image 2002, a successor to Version 5, is a quasi-Windows utility.  The program scans the partition that you want to backup, and if it does not detect any open file in the partition, it immediately carries out the backup in Windows. However, if the partition contains any open files, the program automatically shuts down and boots to DOS to make the backup image. When this is done, it automatically reboots back to Windows.  Thus, you can set up to run Drive Image 2002 unattended on a routine schedule.  

PowerQuest developed a new V2i technology for use in Drive Image 7.0 with Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems. The program is capable of making backup images of any partition with or without open files entirely in the Windows environment. It takes a snapshot of the drive at a single point in time, and then creates the backup image of the partition at that point. You can continue to run your applications, while  Drive Image is making the backup image in the background. The speed of processing the backup image is greatly enhanced with the V2i technology. Time is saved not having to reboot to DOS, and the new technology boosts the processing speed. It took about 35 minutes to backup a partition with 6GB file size using Drive Image 5. With Drive Image 7.0, it takes only 15 minutes.  

Drive Image still retains the UPX compression technology and the SmartSector technology used in previous versions. Four levels of compression are provided including (1) No compression, (2) Standard, the default level with 40% compression, (3) Medium level with 45% compression and (4) High level with 50% compression. Standard, Medium and High levels reduce the image file size, but not the processing time.  SmartSector technology speeds up the copying process by copying only clusters and sectors that contain data, thus reducing the image file size and processing time. This feature can be disabled, if you need to copy both used and unused clusters and sectors in their original layout.  

The Drive Image 7.0 program consists of mainly four window settings, namely Basic View, Advanced View, PowerQuest Backup Image Browser and PowerQuest Recovery Environment  (PORE). Basic View shows the default window that provides quick, easy access to the most commonly used features. It includes a menu bar, icons for common tasks in the right pane, and shortcuts for switching views and doing tasks in the left pane. You can choose to back up a partition immediately from this window. You can save backup images to local partitions in the same hard drive or another internal or external hard drive, local removable media (such as CD, DVD or Zip disks) or a network drive.  

Advanced View provides a quick overview of the partitions on the machine, backup jobs you have created, the backup history for each partition, and Drive Image-related event messages. Advanced View also lets you create backup jobs to schedule backups in the future and choose a regular schedule to repeat backups.  

The PowerQuest Backup Image Browser window simplifies the management and maintenance of your backup image files. Working within a single screen, Backup Image Browser gives you control of the backup image files you can access. You can view backup image file contents, restore individual program and data files from the backup image, or you can mount a selected volume and share it across a network. Backup Image Browser also displays backup image descriptions, so you can identify individual backup image files and volumes. You cannot modify folders and files from within a backup image.  

The PORE utility is used to restore backup image files when there is a computer failure or the operating system fails to respond. For these types of situations, you can simply reboot the computer using the Drive Image CD. The CD will automatically boot into the PORE utility, and lets you run either System Restore to restore the backup image or the Backup Image Browser to perform file-level restore. In order to be able to boot the computer from the Drive Image CD, you may need to modify your system BIOS to make the CD or DVD a bootable drive.  

Drive Image 7.0 also contains a sub-program that copies the operating system, applications and data from one hard drive to another. The feature is useful if you are upgrading to a larger hard drive.  

In conclusion, I would highly recommend Drive Image 7.0 for backing up operating systems. The program utilizes a new V2i technology that can make backup images without leaving the Windows system. The V2i technology also greatly enhances the image processing speed as compared to earlier versions. The program is not capable of making incremental backups. In backing up data files to which I make frequent changes, I prefer to use another backup program that can make incremental copies of the files.