Powerquest Drive Image 2002 (Does Not Support Windows XP, but does support all others). Reduce your risk by protecting your data with PowerQuests Drive Image 2002. You can quickly create hard drive images for backup to protect your data. Drive Image 2002 easily enables you to restore your data after a computer disaster or system upgrade. Using a familiar Windows interface you can create an exact copy of your entire hard drive or partition in minutes onto a Zip, Jaz, CD-R/W, network drive, or another partition. That way, when the inevitable virus or system crash occurs, you will have an exact image of your drive secured, ready to use.

**Previous Users** Software for previous users is for those who have previous versions of a particular product. The software is also in packaging that is required for the manufacturers rebate. The combination of owning a previous version of the software plus having the correct packaging is what allows the customer to qualify for the manufacturerâs rebate. New users receive packaged software that does not allow them to qualify for the rebate. However, the software itself for both new users and previous users is exactly the same.

No fuss, no fumbling with media; back up your entire drive the easy way with Drive Image 2002. Drive Image utilities let you back up your whole hard drive to another drive as if it was a file. It's fast and easy to back up, and fast and easy to restore your system if you have a disaster. The helpful wizards, the automatic scheduling, and the partitioning tool (for setting aside a section of your drive for backup images) make Drive Image the simplest image tool on the market.

Other utilities make you reboot in DOS to run them; Drive Image 2002 has a friendly Windows interface, and provided you're not backing up your system partition, you can do everything from Windows. If you do want to back up your system partition, the software takes care of rebooting, running the backup, and restarting Windows automatically. And if that's not convenient, you can schedule it to run automatically when you shut down your PC. Plus, you can set it to do regular backups at times when you're not likely to be using your PC.

In addition to the straightforward wizard options, there are also more powerful tools available. If you don't have a second hard drive or space on your primary drive, you can save an image onto a CD-ROM, a removable drive, or another PC over a network. If you want to upgrade to a new system rather than back up your data, you can clone one hard drive onto another. Although it's a Windows program, you can back up Linux file systems as well as FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. You can password-protect your backup partition, back up the Master Boot Record, and clean the boot partition. And when things go wrong, in addition to booting from rescue disks and running a full restore, the ImageExplorer utility lets you retrieve individual files from your backups.

Drive Image 2002 is powerful enough to keep your files safe and simple enough to make backups painless. Just make sure the disk you save your backup to doesn't suffer the same disaster as your PC. --Mary Branscombe, Amazon.co.uk

Drive Image 2002 is a complete solution for disaster recovery, backups, and system upgrades. PowerQuest's popular backup software easily enables you to restore your data after a computer disaster or system upgrade. Quickly create hard drive images for backup to protect your data. Using a familiar Windows interface, you can create an exact copy of your entire hard drive or partition on a Zip, Jaz, CD-R/RW, or network drive, or another partition.

This latest version includes imaging technology that allows you to create and restore drive images while running Windows, unlike other desktop imaging solutions which require booting to DOS. You can also save your image files directly to another section of your hard drive by automatically creating a dedicated backup partition. Additionally, LAN support allows you to save hard drive images to, and restore from, a network drive. A new and improved online help section quickly guides you through all the software's functions and walks you through common backup scenarios.

I've seen the ups and downs reviews, with some people saying this software is catastrophic, and others saying it just isn't all that great. Those people are likely somewhat ignorant of computer technology, PCs, hard drives, file systems, and the like. Don't pay attention to that nonsense: This is a superb little application.

Drive Image 2002 is one of those VERY rare instances in computer life where an application does exactly what it says it will do: perfectly. It's elegant, simple, and for someone who actually reads the basic instructions, pretty much a no-brainer.

I looked at various Web sites, blogs, and commentaries by others, and saw that two good points to remember are to first, defrag the partitions you're going to image; and second, store the image on the hard drive (to a partition that has the room). This is problematic for people who have a single 80GB+ partition for their entire system, but those folks shouldn't be messing with an image program in the first place, as far as I'm concerned.

* You can set an option to split an image into chunks, the default being 670KB, a good size for CDs, and use your burner software to copy over the image file pieces. DI can easily copy directly to CD, but it takes longer.

I tested this program various ways, and in all cases it worked flawlessly. If I understand it, the two "rescue disks" use a different version of DOS than a typical Windows 9x machine, which provides a way to take an entire partition without worrying about open files. Likewise, it avoids the need to use the XP Recovery Console---always an aggravation in itself.

DI 2002 (v. 6.0) had no problem with my Win2K partition, although I'm using FAT32 and not NTFS. I'd suggest getting version 7.x, written to definitely include XP if you're on an XP machine. I imaged the C: and D: partitions (W98se, W2K), then formatted the D: drive. The restore options offer both, or one of the two, using an Explorer-like interface (along with many other options for specific files, or to create and resize partitions on the fly).

I then formatted the C: drive---always a very scary proposition---and booted to the rescue floppies. Again, not a single problem whatsoever. I restored the C: drive in about 5 minutes, and "wah-lah" I was back in business. Amazing!

Creating the image on the hard drive made backing up 5GB of information (10GB of actual space) a breeze. The entire backup, using high compression, took about 10 minutes. The restore was less. When I made a split image file it took about a minute longer.

Whomever used this program and trashed their system, apparently didn't bother to read anything, do anything, or follow any instructions correctly at all. Even so, with the interface being so simple, there must have been a far more serious problem on the systems.

I'm now a convert. No more "backup" programs: From now on, it's the image route for me. With today's trojans, worms, viruses, and other ways to almost immediately hose your system, there's a tremendous amount of peace of mind having a restore process that puts back a perfect system in less than 20 minutes.

I've used Drive Image and am finally replacing it with hopefully something that'll function. Drive Image successfully created up a backup pqi file and even copied that onto cds. But its now that I am trying to restore the image file and am coming up with software errors and havn't been able to restore without error for 4 reboots. Now I'm uninstalling this garbage and replacing it with Ghost. If even that software can't get this right then a hard drive duplicator (hardware) may be the way to go. Try the norton product or get the hardware version, don't learn the hard way.

WARNING:The product documentaion is just a few pages long and does not convey the full extent of steps necessary to actually perform a complete hard drive image back up and restore.This product actually rendered the drive I was trying to back up inactive and would not boot frtom the new drive.

If you value your data watch out using this one!I spent 70 dollars on this software." I will share my strong consumer opinions with all"

I have had horrible luck with this product.

First, when it tried to create a backup partition, it wiped out my whole hard drive. So I had to reload everything.

Then it will not burn the image to CDs as advertised.

I wrote to tech support for help and no response after a week. I wrote again and no response for 35 days.

When they finally did write back, they wanted me to uninstall practically everything and actually make hardware changes to my PC in order to get their product to work. NOT!

The product went in the trash - and I don't buy Power Quest products any more.

Drive Image is the best, and easiest to use, backup software I've ever used. With only floppy and CD drives it can restore and entire hard disk in less than an hour, instead of weeks.
For easier use for regular data backups, I'd recommend re-partitioning so all data files are in a separate partition. Then backup that partition with all your data files to a rotating set of CD-RW's on a regular basis.