Using your personal computer

 

Hilton Head Island Computer Club

DI2002

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This software is from PowerQuest and is the latest version in this type of software.  The function is to clone or create an image of a drive and/or a partition.  I have used PowerQuest products Drive Image 2 and 4 and their PartitionMagic versions 5,6 and 7.  In my opinion they are the premier software company in hard disk management and with this version of Drive Image the best in this area.  The following is a description from their web site of the capability of DI:

 

Drive Image® 2002 is a complete solution for disaster recovery, backups, and system upgrades. Drive Image 2002 protects data on your hard drive from virtually any computer disaster. With its new Windows interface and integrated partitioning technology, Drive Image 2002 maintains its position as the premier disk imaging utility. Designed for PC users of all levels, you can depend on the proven technology of Drive Image.

 

· Let me describe some of the issues and how and why you can protect your computer for almost any problem. 

· You have a single drive on you computer and you have not created any additional partitions.  On the hard drive are your operating system and all your files.  If you add another hard drive or resized your current drive into an additional partition you could either do a drive-to-drive or partition-to-partition cloning.   I use the term cloning because you cannot just copy from one drive to another, cloning make sure that every byte is the same as the original.  Making an image is a single file either compressed or not with all the same information but you require the software to do a restore. 

· It is not possible for any software to image or clone the operating system (OS) while you are using it.  This means that you need to be using another OS during the process and it is generally done in DOS. 

· For a backup to be useful your data should be stored in at least two locations and if possible also not in the same place.  A second hard drive, magnetic tape, zip drives or CDs are the choices.  

· You need an approach to do the backup/cloning on a regular basis and need to test you ability to restore your drive/partition and also a folder/file to be secure.  You should archive your image at different points in time in case you accidentally create a bad image.  You should try to select windows when your computer is running with no known problems and create a image.  The after loading a major piece of software uses it for a while and then create another image.  Date your archives and place them in a secure spot.

I have been using the software now for about a month and would like to describe what I have on my computer and how I used it.  I have three hard drives each with three partitions; a DVD/CD-ROM, a CD burner and a parallel port zip drive.   In the first drive I have Widows ME in the C partition, Windows XP in D and data and some backup in the E.   I keep an image of those partitions in each of the tree partitions in the second drive.  Currently I am using only one partition in the third drive and really do not need that drive.  I have decided to use the image approach to cloning the drive because the one file describes the item better then many files and uses less space and I can always recover.  I need to remark about something else.   DI will not create a file larger than about 2 GB and uses additional files as needed; I suspect it is the limit on a FAT (16) type file that they do not want to exceed. When you install DI you are asked if you want to create emergency disks and you should.  It will require two floppies and they will allow you to boot to DOS and from there you can run most functions of DI.  As an example my Win XP partition is 5.68 GB and the image that is the highest compression is two files for a total of 3.09 GB

 

One of the best new features of DI is the ability to do automatic backup.  It uses the Task Scheduler, which comes with all versions of Windows since Win 98.  I am currently doing all my imaging during the night on an automatic basis using Task Scheduler for the two OSs and the partition with many of the executable and downloaded files.