Disk Imaging

Don’t you just hate it when you install a piece of software you’ve downloaded off the Internet and it does something unexpected with your system, *cough* AOL *cough*? Didn’t have time to make a backup, or at worst, didn’t want to? A disk imaging software solution, such as Powerquest’s Drive Image 2002 (referred to here from now on as Drive Image) may be a solution for you.

What does Drive Image do? It take a “snapshot” of your computer’s hard disk (system files and everything else) and allows you to almost instantly restore your files in case of a virus or crash. Imagine driving your car down the road and for whatever reason, you hit a tree. Now imagine pressing a button and in a few moment’s time, restoring your car to its former state before the crash. Wouldn’t that sound good? That’s what drive imaging software can do.

This is Drive Image’s main screen. Options for creating an image, as well as restoring a previously created images are found here. Other functions such as cloning (copying) one hard disk to another is here also, as well as Image Explorer, a handy utility to explore image files (to restore individual files). The boot disk builder is also located on this screen.

Pressing “Create Image” brings the following overview screen forward (after one complete image has been created, the previous file settings are saved to be used again, if needed). The selected drive to be imaged is shown, along with the image file location (in this example the E: drive with the file name MyBackup.pqi). Compression settings are listed, as well as settings for password protection, whether or not the image file is being split into multiple files of x size, file system checks, and other image properties.

When all settings have been entered, Drive Image will bring up a dialog box stating that it is ready to implement the necessary changes and is ready to reboot to DOS to image the drive. So far, so good.

Once in DOS, Drive Image works as advertised, automatically imaging the drive and compressing the resulting image file if selected. Although I was imaging a virtual Windows 2000 NTFS disk to another virtual disk in VMware (which took much longer than using 2 physical drives on a normal operating system or even backing up to cd-r’s or a dvd), it completed fine with no errors.

Booting back into my virtual Win2k o/s, things were running fine, when suddenly I was presented with a horrible BSOD. Oh, well, no problem, I’ll just reboot. After a few minutes, I logged into my account and waited for my desktop to appear.

It never did.

I was able to bring up my task manager, but could not access my start menu or my disks. A reboot into safe mode did not rectify this problem. If only I had a backup…

Better yet, a complete disk image of my drive BEFORE things went south.

If I had been a dummy and, when prompted when installing Drive Image, not created bootable floppy disks, I still would have lucked out because the Drive Image CD is bootable. Although I did run into some trouble using the bootable CD (probably attributable to my using a virtual machine), I still had my boot floppies. In they go and up comes the familiar Drive Image menu screen.

I must admit, I have made many images with Drive Image before, but this was the first time I needed it to bail me out of a jam. What if somehow the image file was corrupted?

I pressed Restore Image and pointed the wizard to my image file and crossed my fingers.

Literally five minutes later, I was able to boot back into my virtual Win2k machine and preceded to work again. No muss, no fuss. Drive Image saved the day.

But what if I never bought Drive Image? Would I have been successful in retrieving my data? Maybe yes, maybe no. Backup software has been around for ages, usually for tape drives, which are slow compared to hard disks or even optical media. Before I bought Drive Image, I bought a piece of backup software called BackupMyPC. For backup software, it is not bad; it works as advertised. Not only can it backup to tape drives, but hard disks and optical drives as well. The only problem with it is, when it performs the backup, it sounds like it’s taking a baseball bat to my drive and whacking it to oblivion. Of course it is not. Another thing is, at least at the time I did discover the fact, they had no “complete” backup solution. What I mean is, the software will backup everything on your hard disk; the problem is, in order to restore the files, you would first have to reinstall Windows, then the backup software, then the files. Ugh. Maybe that has been fixed by now.

I was all set to upgrade Drive Image recently to Drive Image 7 when I found out that Powerquest was bought out by Symantec. Now I have nothing against Symantec; I use many of their products, including Norton Utilities and Antivirus. But Symantec also makes a competing drive imaging product called Ghost and again, I have nothing against Ghost (I even used it while attending The Chubb Institute). So I ditched buying DI7 and read some reviews of a third drive imaging company called Acronis. Acronis made some headway with their software, even being able to image a system drive WITHOUT rebooting to DOS. They even won awards for it. So I thought I would give them a shot. Without a doubt, Acronis True Image 7.0 is by far the easiest drive image software to use, but it comes with some nagging doubts. First off, no “real” tech support. No phone support, but there is web support. So far it works great on my actual system, but would not work in VMware (I just downloaded a 20mB patch so maybe it will work now).

Let this be a lesson to you. Always backup your important files. Using a disk imaging program like Drive Image, True Image or Ghost makes it a snap.

Update:  There are pretty much two companies left in the game:  Symantec (Ghost) and Acronis (True Image); Powerquest was snapped up and incorporated into Ghost by Symantec in 2004.  Both are good products and I use both with no problems at all (knock on wood).