PowerQuest
Gene Barlow’s company, User Group Relations, has recently compiled several informative tutorials onto two CD’s. The first, "Discovering your Hard Drive," is a training CD that focuses on setting up and organizing your hard drive. It is packed with helpful and useful information about your hard drives, how to organize them and protect them. Over two hours of valuable information is included, most of which is not available elsewhere. By carefully studying the contents of this CD, you should be successful in using PartitionMagic to configure your hard drive to your particular needs. The other CD is "Backing Up Your Hard Drive," that focuses on what you should do to backup and protect your data. It will introduce you to the many backup approaches that are being used and show you the advantages and disadvantages of each. Included are detailed examples of how to do the various backup approaches using live examples using Drive Image v7, Drive Image 2002, and DataKeeper v5.

His presentation about using Drive Image as a backup solution is on his UGR web site and won’t be summarized here. See www.ugr.com/ugr6f.html (derived from a PowerPoint slideshow and is viewable by Internet Explorer only) and www.ugr.com/nl0102.html.

Partition Magic 8 is the current version from PowerQuest. A show of hands in the audience indicated the vast majority uses or had used PM. Version 8’s new features support for 160GB partitions (with several of these large partitions on the physical drive), LINUX EXT3 support, and external USB/Firewire hard drives. Other features include the Data Keeper File Backup utility.

It’s purportedly the best version of PM that PowerQuest has put out, available since Sept. 2002. PowerQuest says the next release of PM won’t happen until Microsoft releases LongHorn (2005).

In the first weeks of June 2003, PowerQuest announced the brand new release of Drive Image v7. Of this version, PQ claims it is able to created a compressed image of any partition including an "active" partition such as the partition where the operating system is installed. Typically, this cannot be done. Also, the time required to make this image is far less than competing products. DI7 now includes the ability to restore individual files from a compressed partition image, as well as "mount" the image under a distinct read-only drive letter. DI can write the image to another drive (internal or external), disk-cartridge drives (ZIP, etc), and burners (but not DVD-RAM). Disk spanning is supported.

Restoring an active (system) partition requires the use of the DI bootable CD. The CD loads a micro-version of MS Windows (Win-PE) with all necessary drivers to read the backup drive/media. However, restoring a data or an application (non-system) partition can be done under normal system operation.

Drive Image 7 and V2i Protector is written only for Windows 2000 and XP and will not work on any other version of Windows. Therefore, the DI7 package also includes Drive Image 2002 for Windows 98SE, Me, and NT.

Shortly after the announcement of DI7, PQ announced the release of a workstation version of their V2i Protector, a server/enterprise drive imaging solution. Gene compared the differences between DI7 and V2i. Essentially, V2i Protector is an enterprise-capable solution for drive imaging software. Originally designed for servers, PQ has released V2i Protector Workstation Edition.

V2i Protector does not include the Basic, Easy-to-Use user interface. The only interface available is the more complex, professional business-oriented control panel. Also missing is the DI-2002 version of Drive Image that is included in the DI7 package.

V2i Protector includes the ability to have the workstation managed by the server version of DI/V2i. In a corporate environment, all workstations can be backed up remotely. But as a stand-alone application, V2i includes the capability of incremental image backups.