Disk-imaging software can be put to many varied uses, and products like Drive Image prove particularly useful in our labs when upgrading to a new hard disk or for swiftly refreshing a test system. PowerQuest is heavily promoting the latest version of Drive Image for home users as a complete PC backup solution. This is the same tack it took when Drive Image 2002 was released, and this time PowerQuest has added a few extra features to make it even more user friendly.
It's worth noting that Drive Image 7 only supports Windows 2000 and XP, but the boxed product will include a copy of Drive Image 2002 for use on other Windows systems. Installation is the usual cakewalk and, if you haven't already installed the Microsoft .NET Framework, the program will do it for you, grabbing another 40MB of hard disk space in the process. A new V2i (virtual volume imaging) service is also loaded, which allows image files to be mounted as virtual disks complete with drive letters.
Drive Image steals a march on the competition by now allowing backups to be run without leaving Windows at all. True, this was introduced in the previous version, but 'hot imaging' has now been extended to include the active boot partition as well. Norton Ghost is the only real competition to Drive Image, but its advantages have been reduced; Drive Image now adds long-awaited support for USB and FireWire storage devices. The only feature Ghost still has the monopoly on is support for peer-to-peer connections between two PCs over a USB or parallel cable.
Drive Image's new interface, meanwhile, has the XP look and feel and also offers the same basic and advanced views as Ghost 2003. However, a few features from Drive Image 2002 are missing. The Disk Operations tool, for example, which provided basic hard disk partition management, has been removed, since PowerQuest believes most Drive Image users already own a copy of PartitionMagic, making the feature largely redundant. What's more, the tool for automatically distributing free space evenly among existing partitions has also disappeared.
Similarly, the emergency boot floppy gets its marching orders and has been replaced by the PQRE (PowerQuest Recovery Environment) provided on the bootable CD-ROM. This provides a Windows-style interface for easy restoration of complete drives or you can browse image files, select individual files and choose a destination. The resident Ethernet adaptor is also identified during the boot process, which makes network support more reliable, plus if you're not using DHCP you can enter IP addresses, gateway and DNS details, although you can't browse the network and must enter a remote destination using a UNC path.
When it comes to imaging from Windows, the Basic view presents you with four tasks: backing up a drive; selecting folders or files from an image; restoring a complete disk; or copying one drive to another for easy storage upgrades. Backup is a simple process. You select the source drive and a destination (this can be a local drive, a network location or a CD/DVD burner). You then select from three compression rates for the best combination of speed and space requirements, decide whether to have the image verified after creation, password-protect it and away you go. A job scheduler may be used to run regular backup jobs, but these will only allow you to use local hard disk or network drives as image destinations. For file restoration, you're able to select an image file from Windows Explorer and use a new right-click menu option to mount it as a virtual volume where it will appear as a new local drive. Files and folders can thus be moved to other locations using nothing more than drag and drop.
Performance tests were first carried out on a 900MHz Celeron system with a pair of 15GB ATA/100 hard disks and running Windows XP. Ghost 2003 proved to be marginally faster. We created an image of a primary NTFS partition with 4.5GB of data on to the second drive in 12 minutes, including reboots, whereas Drive Image took 13 and a half minutes -- and no reboots.
Compression also plays a part, as imaging a primary partition on a Pentium III 866MHz running Windows 2000 to an external USB 2 hard disk saw Drive Image return a speed of 6.2MB/s with standard compression: this dropped to 2MB/s with high compression selected.
During testing, however, we also found Drive Image 7 easy to use and the improved device support is a valuable addition. A number of features have been dropped from this version, but the new PQRE rescue boot process is much more sophisticated, and the ability to take hot images of any partition alone makes it a worthwhile purchase. Symantec will have to come up with something special with Ghost 2004 if it's going to beat PowerQuest at the disk-imaging game.