PowerQuest's Drive Image 4.0 Adds CD-R and CD-RW Support, Continuous Data Backup

Volume 17, Issue 10 • November 2000

PowerQuest’s Drive Image 4.0 Adds CD-R and CD-RW Support, Continuous Data Backup

PowerQuest Corp., a provider of solutions for storage management, has announced the release of Drive Image 4.0, the newest version of the company’s fast, complete solution for system backup and recovery. Drive Image 4.0 further simplifies the backup process by adding the ability to write images directly to CD-R and CD-RW devices and adds another level of protection for users’ important data by including continuous data backup with Power-Quest DataKeeper.

“Being able to write directly to a CD-R or a CD-RW without having to make a separate partition for images is very handy,” said Michael P. Smith, owner and CEO of Steco Corp. in Little Rock, Arkansas. “Power-Quest technology saves me on follow-up problems with systems for outside parties.”

Drive Image uses SmartSector technology to create an exact, sector-by-sector image of a hard drive, enabling a user to restore hard-drive resources in the event of a disaster or damage to the system. Image files can be stored to a separate drive partition, on a Jaz or Zip disk; secondary hard drive; other removable media device; or directly to an IDE, SCSI, or ATAPI CD-R or CD-RW drive.

“Drive Image allows you to choose the media that best suits your backup and recovery needs, whether it be another hard drive, a network drive, or removable media,” said Anne Vincenti, director of product management for PowerQuest. “Drive Image lets you rest easy knowing that if any problems occur, your computer can be restored to its exact working state with just a click of a button.”

The ability to save images directly to CD-R and CD-RW extends options for storing an image file. Drive Image 4.0 works with IDE, SCSI, or ATAPI drives that are Multi-Media Command Set version 2 (MMC-2)-compliant, which includes most newer drives. This excludes CD-R and CD-RW drives connected via USB, parallel port, and PCMCIA. Drive Image will estimate the size of the image file to ensure adequate disk space or removable media for the backup. Images can be spanned across multiple CD-RW disks.

With the addition of PowerQuest DataKeeper, users can now combine hard-drive imaging with continuous data monitoring. PowerQuest DataKeeper continuously monitors file activity in the background and supports compressed backups on the fly. Once a user configures the program, backups will be created automatically each time a file is modified. This allows users to have incremental versions of documents between complete system images or backups, adding another layer of protection to the user’s data.

Drive Image 4.0 is compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows (including Windows 2000 Professional and Millennium).

According to the company, key features of Drive Image 4.0 that have been retained from previous versions include the following:

SmartSector imaging, which provides an exact hard-drive image, including all optimizations and customizations. SmartSector imaging also reduces the time required to create and restore images over file-by-file imaging.
Media spanning, allowing images to be spanned across removable media such as Jaz, Zip, CD-RW, or other storage media
Compression options, which give the user control over the compression level of the hard-drive image for greater time savings in imaging and restoring the drive
Windows look and feel and a Wizard-driven interface for greater ease of use

Drive Image 4.0 is available for $69.95. Languages supported include English, Ger-man, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Users may purchase the product through computer retail stores or via download from PowerQuest’s Web site (https://order.powerquest.com/webstore/index.html).

Source: PowerQuest Corp., Orem, UT, 800/379-2566; http://www.powerquest.com.

Table of Contents

Information Today Home Page