Backing up a typical hard disk takes ages and it needs to be done on a regular basis to be useful. Worse still, most backups won't even restore your computer to its pre-crash state - you'll usually have to reinstall Windows and the back-up application first and even then, you may only retrieve your documents and not your installed applications. Most backups are difficult to use effectively.

Happily, there is a better way and while PowerQuest Drive Image 7 sounds tedious, it may just be the best software you ever buy.

At its simplest, Drive Image lets you copy a hard disk - not just the files but the entire disk. That's an important distinction. The application creates an 'image' of a hard disk that if applied to another hard disk, creates an exact duplicate of the original. So if you take an image of your set-up in its working state, you can compute safe in the knowledge that you can always get your PC back to that working state.

For backups, however, Drive Image excels. Use the scheduling wizard to take an image of your hard disk at regular intervals and you can restore your PC to its most recent working state under almost any circumstances.

Start your PC with a boot disk and you can apply an image even if Windows is completely corrupt.

This is something that all previous versions of Drive Image have been capable of but version 7 adds some new features. A wizard leads novices through the process, images can be created while you're still using Windows and individual files can be restored from within an image.

The size of the image files depend on the size of your hard disk but compression will squash the data down to around half its original size.

For large hard disks, that can still mean multi-gigabyte files but Drive Image can chop images into smaller files of any size and will write directly to recordable CDs and DVDs.

Contact: PowerQuest 020 7341 5571
www.powerquest.com