Symantec Drive Image 7.0 Full Version for PC (DM70ENK1)

Pros: Fast backup solution from the Windows environment; good scheduling setup
Cons: Do not use with CD's or DVD's

Background: Why do I own this? Any who have read many of my reviews know that I am constantly upgrading my own computer as well as building computers for friends, family and sale to others. As such, I have the need to use a wide variety of ...

Pros: Ease of Use, Reliable, Fast, backup the boot drive w/o leaving Windows, supports USB/Firewire drives
Cons: Restoring invididual files from a hard disk is easy, but almost impossible from cd’s

Drive Image 7 is a Windows software utility from Powerquest (now part of Symantec), that creates Disk Image backups of any hard disk or partition. Drive Image does this by copying your drive on a sector by sector basis, creating a duplicate of ...

Pros: Solid, mostly bug free way to extract partition images to another disk, or CD, etc.
Cons: Single file restore from CD images unmanageable, problems backing up multi partitions direct to CD

Please let me start by saying, I have been using Drive Image for a very, very long time (2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.X, 2002 (6.x), and now 7) and it has been my backup software of choice for many years. It's power lies in the fact that the program does not do the ...

Pros: For a partial restore...there are absolutely none. Don't waste your money.
Cons: See above

OK program for doing a straight restore. However, if you have to do a partial restore......God have mercy on your soul.

In order to get the restore process started I had to switch CDROMs 73 times. I finally gave up and just reinstalled everything manually. I don't know what committee at Powerquest came up with this process. If they think endlessly switching CDROMs is fun, they are truely insane.

Pros: Easy backups, flexible. Can burn directly to CD/DVD
Cons: Acquired by Symantec. Mounting a backup should be an option on the main page.

I've used Drive Image since version 2 and it's saved my skin many times. It's always been so easy to restore a clean copy of windows install of doing a reinstall. Having settings and preferences all intact is great.

Version seven had some changes that surprised me. The first surprise is no more booting into DOS. I could hardly believe I could create a backup of the partition currently in use. The second major surprise is when I explored the "restore file or folders" option. After finding a backup image to explore for files, there is an option to mount the drive! Now the backup is completely navigatible with windows explorer and appears as another hard drive on your computer. I could even scan the mounted volume for accidentally erased data since Drive Image even retains that when making an image.