Review: O&O Disk Image backup utility

O&O Disk Image is a reasonably priced backup utility that uses disk images to save and restore exact copies of your hard drive(s) to prepare against data loss and system failure.

It is an easy application to use and presents you with a simple list of options for imaging (backing up), restoring, mounting or burning drives to offer secure and reliable backup.

A disk image is a compressed copy of all files and folders on a drive, although O &O does offer a range of image-creation options, including the ability to only backup used sectors or create an incremental imaging backup that builds a new file for data that has been updated or modified since the original base image.

Creating a backup is simply a case of choosing your imaging mode, encryption and file splitting options and choosing a destination for the saved file. Ideally this would be a separate hard drive on your system but you do have the option to burn the image to optical media. When restoring you can either completely replace the contents of the disk with the backed-up image or mount the image file as a drive, which allows you to access and manage individual files from the backup set.

You can convert, split and merge existing images, while tools to check a disk or a pre-made image for errors are also available.

This is about the extent of what is a relatively basic package, but it has to be said that aside from some rather frustrating system freezes while the application gathers drive information it works very well. It is not the fastest software in the world if you’re working with high-capacity drives, but the incremental imaging option does offer you a quicker way to identify and back up modified files.

O&O's Disk Image is very straightforward to use, albeit a little slow and not exactly packed with features. But it does what it is intended to do well, and those concerned about keeping regular and concise backups of critical drives will find peace of mind.