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You tell Drive Image which image file it should use to restore the drive you want to replace, click a few times and walk away.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Using Drive Image: How to rescue your Windows files when things go bad


August 20, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   The best emergency backup method for Windows isn't a backup method at all.
   A backup program saves files. You can only hope it saves the ones you need, and you never find out if they're the right files until it's too late.
   But my method saves your bacon, your sanity and ALL your files. Best of all, my method doesn't require a degree in Molecular Physics. You just install a program and click a few items to run it.
   This miracle is called Drive Image. It completely copies your entire main drive (the C: drive) and stores the copy, called an image, on another drive. When Windows makes a mess of itself, you run Drive Image and tell it to restore the good version of Windows and all its files. This takes 10 to 20 minutes.
   Drive Image can compress the copy so that it's a lot smaller than the original drive. It can also split up the image file, which holds the copy of the original drive, into smaller pieces that can fit on CDs or on Zip disks. It can even split up the copy of any drive into portions that can fit on successive disks in a CD-ROM drive or Zip drive.
   Drive Image also can work like a traditional backup program by letting you fish out individual files from an image copy, but this is a bad way to use it unless you're an expert on Windows. When Windows fails, it needs more than window dressing to make everything right. It needs a transplant, and replacing the entire Windows C: drive is the fastest and easiest way to do it. On my wife's Windows PC, I can replace the entire contents of the C: drive in 15 minutes.
   Drive Image comes from PowerQuest, a widely respected software design company, and costs $60 to $70. You can find it a stores that sell software or you can buy it and download it immediately from the company's Web site at http://www.powerquest.com.
   Here's how Drive Image works. After you install it, you create a duplicate (an image copy) of one of your hard drives. (For our purposes, I'm describing a Windows rescue system. So you'd save an image copy of the C: drive, where Windows stores all its files. Programs you add yourself are also stored in that C: drive. You can also save an image copy of your D: drive or any other disk partition.)
   You store the image file on a separate drive. Ideally, you'd store multiple images, making an image backup once a week so you'd always be able to restore everything without losing more than a week's new files.
   When you have to reinstall Windows, you run Drive Image from Windows. If Windows won't even boot up, you boot the PC from a floppy disk that contains the Drive Image files. No matter which way you run the program, you simply tell Drive Image which image file it should use to restore the drive you want to replace, click a few times and walk away.
   The main drawback of Drive Image is obvious -- you need a separate drive for storing image files. This doesn't mean you need a second hard disk.
   I'd better explain. "Drives" are sometimes actual devices that contain spinning disks, but often what we call "drives" are actually just sectioned-off parts of a common disk. If you bought a new computer recently, it probably came with a very big disk drive. The manufacturer might have sectioned off part of that drive so that the PC would seem to have TWO drives instead of one. This is done by making two partitions on the disk. Partitions look like separate drives to the computer.
   So the second drive can be another partition on the same physical disk or it can be a physically separate disk drive. I use a physically separate disk drive. It's safer. If the disk drive that holds both partitions fails, you lose too much. I copy image files to a CD-ROM disk for permanent storage, too.
   Note that Drive Image doesn't create its image files on CDs. It creates them on the secondary partition. Then I manually copy them onto CDs after I boot back up into Windows. (I have Drive Image split the image into 650-megabyte chunks, the perfect size for storage on CD.)
   Because we have many networked PCs at home, my wife and I need only one CD recorder. The PC that has the CD burner copies drive images onto CDs for all the other PCs. This has worked perfectly and costs us very little in time and money -- 20 minutes or so to make an image copy (copying is a slower process than restoring) and a few minutes for each CD copy, along with about 30 cents for each blank CD.
   Another problem with restoring an entire Windows drive this way has to do with files that were created or changed after you made your latest drive image. You'll lose all of them unless you take an extra step. What you MUST do is save your personal documents separately so you can restore them separately. (If you seldom create personal documents -- e-mail, word processing letters and reports, digital photos and so on -- you can skip this step.)
   Create a folder on the second hard drive called DOCBAK. The name is short so it won't be altered by Windows. (Your Windows PC stores names that are longer than six characters two different ways. This can be confusing in emergencies.)
   Make a shortcut to the folder on your desktop. Double click on it and create a folder called My Documents. Open the regular folder called My Documents (the one you use on your C: drive) and select everything in it. You can do this quickly by pressing Press Ctrl-A. Right click on the selected files and folders and drag them to the shortcut icon for DOCBAK, then choose "Copy" from the menu that pops open.
   If you need to save items in your e-mail folders (your Inbox and Sent Items folders and any other ones you've created), open the folder where your e-mail is stored and drag the mail files to the DOCBAK icon using the right-button method. If you have other documents that are stored elsewhere on the C: drive, copy them the same way.
   When you restore the entire C: drive using Drive Image, you can copy your documents and mail back over to your restored C: drive by reversing the procedure above.