Make a security backup of your whole system
with this new product from Laplink
I imagine that most people are now aware of
the importance of making backups of their files. You only need one catastrophic
failure to prompt a backup regime of almost ridiculous proportions.
Laplink
Disk Image Professional
However, what happens if your machine or
even the hard drive inside it fails. Then you face the unenviable task of
reinstalling Windows, plus all your programs. On top of that you’ll need to
find the settings for your internet, email clients and hopefully you can still
remember where you put the drivers for that video card, sound card,
motherboard, etc… Well, I’m sure you get the picture.
In fact, it’s my experience that most people
wouldn’t attempt a full reinstallation anyway. Yet with the help of this latest
product from Laplink, it can be a relatively straightforward procedure.
The program offers two types of backup: a
disk image or a disk clone. There are advantages and disadvantages with both
options, but basically an image is a snapshot of your hard drive's data, which
can be encrypted and compressed. It can also be set to address only parts of
the disk that contains data. The saved image can be mounted like an external hard
drive and used to copy files or folders back to your main drive. However, you
can't save or delete files within an image.
The
program offers two types of backup: a disk image or a disk clone
You also have a choice in the type of image
you create. It can be a base image, usually the first backup, followed by
either an incremental, or differential image. Incremental stores a complete
image, including any changes made to the base, whereas differential only stores
the difference between the base or the last differential.
A clone, on the other hand, is a complete
and exact copy of your hard drive, including the operating system and all the
programs you have already installed. Naturally, this consumes more storage
space, but it does allow you to recover the complete system onto a new hard
drive in the event of a failure. In fact, it has another use mainly for
business users, who possibly could have a number of machines running similar
software. In that case, you simply install everything onto one machine, clone
the drive, then install the cloned image onto all the other machines. Quite a
time saver!
You don’t have to worry about the catch-22
problem either, where perhaps you can’t access the data to restore the system,
without a working system to run the software on. The supplied CD is bootable,
complete with a working subset of Windows, which allows you to select and
restore an image when Windows fails to boot.
You
don’t have to worry about the catch-22 problem either, where perhaps you can’t
access the data to restore the system, without a working system to run the
software on.
The ideal situation is to create a clone
after you’ve set up your system with all the programs, files and utilities you
normally need to work with. The clone image would normally be stored on an
external or network drive, or one that you can access in the event of a virus
attack or some hardware failure. Alternatively, you can spread the image over a
number of CDs, DVD's or Blu-ray discs.
You can create time-scheduled images using
the Job Assistant, reflecting changes or additions you might have made to your
system since the last clone or image was made. In this way, you can recover
your system very quickly, even onto a completely new computer.
I have seen and used drive cloning utilities
before, but none as comprehensive as this one.
|
Details
·
Price: $38
·
Manufacturer: Laplink Software Inc.
·
Website: www.laplink.com
·
Required spec: Windows XP or later, 256MB RAM
for installation, 1GB RAM to run from bootable disc
·
Quality: 9
·
Value: 9
·
Overall: 9
|
