Utilities

Like many businesses, law firms are increasingly using networks employing file and other servers. These networks, servers and workstations take a great deal of time to set up properly. And once set up, it would be a horrendous burden to set them up again in the case of a catastrophic loss of data.

So businesses are investing in programs to back up hard drive information, which could include everything from case documents to customized settings. But because Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 use hidden files not saved by normal backup programs, you can’t simply restore the information to a new hard drive and expect the computer to function as before.
Thus, you will need a program that automatically backs up the hidden system files, such as custom settings and components enabling the operating system to run.

Drive Image Pro 4.0 does this by making an exact image of the partition or partitions on each hard drive. If your hard drive is lost, you can restore your hard disk with this copied image. Your new drive will instantly function exactly as the old drive did.

What’s a partition? It’s a given amount of space on your hard drive. A partition may be the whole hard drive or a slice of it. If your hard drive is broken into four segments, it has four partitions. If it’s not divided, it has just one partition. Thus, every hard drive must have at least one partition, and as a rule, you must have at least one partition per operating system.

FDISK.EXE, the utility program that comes with Windows to create and delete partitions, can do so only by destroying all the existing data on the hard drive. It does not have the ability to resize a partition, except by deleting all the partitions on the drive and creating new partitions in the sizes desired.

Drive Image Pro 4.0 (which includes PartitionMagic Pro 6.0), handles these tasks as well or better than any other program.

This program also can back up and restore partitions to the same hard drive if corruption renders the computer unbootable.
Drive Image can resize, move and copy partitions on the same hard drive, move a partition from one drive to another, or move an old hard drive to a new one – without destroying any data on the hard drive.

To create, resize or move a partition without Drive Image Pro 4.0, you would have to use the DOS program FDISK.EXE, which would erase all the hard disk information. You then would have to reinstall your operating system and restore all information from a backup. This is very time consuming.

You would run into the same problem when upgrading a computer to a larger hard disk. Microsoft software can back up hidden system files, but the procedure may be too difficult for casual computer users. With Drive Image, you can make an exact copy of the disk to be replaced and restore it with the replacement drive in a two-step operation. Drive Image also permits cloning the disk to the replacement disk by connecting both drives to the computer at the same time, performing the operation, and then removing the old drive.

Backing up a partition can be as easy as a few mouse clicks after starting the program. You can choose between various combinations of speed and disk space, and you can back up using various media, including CD-recordable and CD-rewriteable. Also the backup media can be made bootable, which means the media can boot up a computer from the CD-ROM drive instead of the operating system on the hard drive. However, you may have trouble setting up Iomega Corp.’s Jaz and Castlewood Systems Inc.’s ORB drives because of how operating systems see them.

The menus for Drive Image Pro and PartitionMagic are more intuitive and easy to use than ever. You don’t have to leave the Windows interface to perform operations on a drive lacking a boot partition (the partition containing the operating system you have booted from), allowing you to use the familiar Windows look instead of DOS’s scary appearance. Also you do less work, since you can do two boots in one operation. Operations on a drive with a boot partition cause the program to automatically reboot into DOS, perform a batch file of the operations selected in the Windows session, and reboot back into Windows when the operations are done.

One of Drive Image Pro’s greatest uses is illustrated by the following scenario. Say your firm wants to buy a program called LawyerAid that runs only on Windows 95, not Windows ME, the operating system on all your firm’s computers.

To run LawyerAid, you would have to install Windows 95 on your hard drive. If you installed Windows 95 using only the software that comes with Windows, you must use the FDISK to create new partitions, format them, and install Windows 95 and then reinstall Windows ME. This could take an entire day of your or your consultant’s time per computer.

With Drive Image Pro, you could do this to all computers in only a day, assuming all your networked computers are essentially the same.

DOS 5.0 or later, Windows 95/98/ME/NT 4.0/2000

Price: 10 users for $220

Reviewed by Steven Schmidt, shareholder, director and president of Business & Technology Law, Albuquerque, N.M.

Apr/May '01 Issue

PROS
A powerful backup solution and time saver. Backups can be burned directly to CD-R or CD-RW, and can span multiple disks. Backups can be made to removable media.

CONS
Drive Image Pro and certain functions run only in DOS mode.

VERDICT
A must-have program for a firm that administers its own computer services.

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Updated 09/18/01
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