Drive Image 4 Writes to CD

Getting It on Disc

On the other hand, one of the places you can direct your files to is your CD-RW drive, making this edition of the program more viable as a backup utility. If your image won't fit on one CD, Drive Image will let you span multiple discs. You'll need an IDE or SCSI CD-R or CD-RW drive (the application doesn't support parallel port or Universal Serial Bus drives).

One quirk: Drive Image can only write to unformatted CDs. That means that CD-RW discs must be new and unused, or you must erase them with something like Adaptec DirectCD's CD-RW Eraser. CD-R discs must be new and unused.

That restriction wouldn't be much of a problem if it were properly documented. Trying to write to a formatted CD-RW disc yields an unhelpful, undocumented error message. And the printed documentation tells you less about this formatting rule than what I told you in the previous paragraph.

But once you have an image saved to a CD, you have protection. In fact, with the right hardware, you'll be able to boot directly from that CD into Drive Image--even if it spans several CDs--after which you can easily restore your hard drive.

Another Kind of Image Editor

Drive Image 4.0 comes with some additional programs that, unlike the main one, run in Windows. One of them, the Image File Editor, allows you to examine the contents of your images, restore single files from them, combine multiple images into one file, or split an image into smaller pieces (useful if your CD-RW drive is not among the many that Drive Image supports).

Another bundled program, PowerQuest Data Keeper, handles small, everyday backups, making it a nice compliment to Drive Image, which is more appropriate for big, "get everything, use occasionally" backups. Data Keeper, which is also available separately, works in the background, backing up files as you create and alter them.

Other backup programs cost less than Drive Image, but few can restore a drive so quickly and so exactly to its previous condition. The program is definitely worth its price, despite the minor shortcomings noted here.

If you're already using Drive Image, should you upgrade? If you have Windows 2000, Windows Me, or a CD-RW drive, the answer is yes. Otherwise, stick with your old version.