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Your personal data, and the digital working environment it occupies, can easily become the most valuable aspect of your system.
In the past the software tools for preserving these assets were split into backup utilities and environment migration utilities.
Now a new generation of disk-imaging software is emerging that combines elements of both, along with enhanced usability. In this group test we review five of these disk-imaging programs.
Many PCs are now sold with the operating system and applications pre-installed as a compressed hidden partition on the hard disk.
In the event of a serious corruption or deletion of the OS, or applications that are installed on the main working partition, providing there is no hardware fault, the system can be restored to its original condition from the hidden partition. However, this doesn’t protect your work files and is ineffective if there is a permanent hard disk failure.
Backup has always been a foreign concept for the average home PC user, at least in part because of the extra work, time, cost and complexity involved.
Probably the only way this situation will ever really change is if backup is built in to the operating system and hardware and by default happens automatically and transparently to the end user. At least some versions of Windows Vista will include a basic imaging utility that uses the VHD (Microsoft virtual hard disk) file format.
For some time the only suitable media for low-cost backup with suitable speed and capacity has been an auxiliary hard disk.
The availability of low-cost external drives, with USB2 and/or Firewire interfaces, is beginning to make personal backup a more palatable proposition. Now let’s look at the best tools for the actual job of getting the data onto these drives.
This article is part of a group test of drive-imaging software.
See also:
Acronis True Image
10 Home
Paragon Hard Disk
Manager 8
R-Tools R-Drive
Image 3.0
Runtime
Software Drive Image XML
Symantec
Norton Save & Restore
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf download above.
Editor's choice and recommended buy is on the next page.
All Backup Tools Tags: Backup
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