 Superb Program (When you Read The Instructions!), 2004-09-14
I've seen the ups and downs reviews, with some people saying this software is catastrophic, and others saying it just isn't all that great. Those people are likely somewhat ignorant of computer technology, PCs, hard drives, file systems, and the like. Don't pay attention to that nonsense: This is a superb little application.
Drive Image 2002 is one of those VERY rare instances in computer life where an application does exactly what it says it will do: perfectly. It's elegant, simple, and for someone who actually reads the basic instructions, pretty much a no-brainer.
I looked at various Web sites, blogs, and commentaries by others, and saw that two good points to remember are to first, defrag the partitions you're going to image; and second, store the image on the hard drive (to a partition that has the room). This is problematic for people who have a single 80GB+ partition for their entire system, but those folks shouldn't be messing with an image program in the first place, as far as I'm concerned.
* You can set an option to split an image into chunks, the default being 670KB, a good size for CDs, and use your burner software to copy over the image file pieces. DI can easily copy directly to CD, but it takes longer.
I tested this program various ways, and in all cases it worked flawlessly. If I understand it, the two "rescue disks" use a different version of DOS than a typical Windows 9x machine, which provides a way to take an entire partition without worrying about open files. Likewise, it avoids the need to use the XP Recovery Console---always an aggravation in itself.
DI 2002 (v. 6.0) had no problem with my Win2K partition, although I'm using FAT32 and not NTFS. I'd suggest getting version 7.x, written to definitely include XP if you're on an XP machine. I imaged the C: and D: partitions (W98se, W2K), then formatted the D: drive. The restore options offer both, or one of the two, using an Explorer-like interface (along with many other options for specific files, or to create and resize partitions on the fly).
I then formatted the C: drive---always a very scary proposition---and booted to the rescue floppies. Again, not a single problem whatsoever. I restored the C: drive in about 5 minutes, and "wah-lah" I was back in business. Amazing!
Creating the image on the hard drive made backing up 5GB of information (10GB of actual space) a breeze. The entire backup, using high compression, took about 10 minutes. The restore was less. When I made a split image file it took about a minute longer.
Whomever used this program and trashed their system, apparently didn't bother to read anything, do anything, or follow any instructions correctly at all. Even so, with the interface being so simple, there must have been a far more serious problem on the systems.
I'm now a convert. No more "backup" programs: From now on, it's the image route for me. With today's trojans, worms, viruses, and other ways to almost immediately hose your system, there's a tremendous amount of peace of mind having a restore process that puts back a perfect system in less than 20 minutes.
 Do not learn the hard way, 2004-04-26
I've used Drive Image and am finally replacing it with hopefully something that'll function. Drive Image successfully created up a backup pqi file and even copied that onto cds. But its now that I am trying to restore the image file and am coming up with software errors and havn't been able to restore without error for 4 reboots. Now I'm uninstalling this garbage and replacing it with Ghost. If even that software can't get this right then a hard drive duplicator (hardware) may be the way to go. Try the norton product or get the hardware version, don't learn the hard way.
3 of 3 customers found the following review helpful:
Drive Image 2002, 2003-11-23
WARNING:The product documentaion is just a few pages long and does not convey the full extent of steps necessary to actually perform a complete hard drive image back up and restore.This product actually rendered the drive I was trying to back up inactive and would not boot frtom the new drive.If you value your data watch out using this one!I spent 70 dollars on this software." I will share my strong consumer opinions with all"
Horrible Product, 2003-06-27
I have had horrible luck with this product.First, when it tried to create a backup partition, it wiped out my whole hard drive. So I had to reload everything. Then it will not burn the image to CDs as advertised. I wrote to tech support for help and no response after a week. I wrote again and no response for 35 days. When they finally did write back, they wanted me to uninstall practically everything and actually make hardware changes to my PC in order to get their product to work. NOT! The product went in the trash - and I don't buy Power Quest products any more.
7 of 8 customers found the following review helpful:
Best Backup/Restore Utility Ever, 2003-05-24
Drive Image is the best, and easiest to use, backup software I've ever used. With only floppy and CD drives it can restore and entire hard disk in less than an hour, instead of weeks.
For easier use for regular data backups, I'd recommend re-partitioning so all data files are in a separate partition. Then backup that partition with all your data files to a rotating set of CD-RW's on a regular basis.
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Amazon Sales Rank:#7273