As part of my new rig, I purchased a Maxtor 120GB HDD which will be used for accommodating drive image backups. When not in use, I’ll eject it from the USB config., and switch it off. That’s because I once had a boot sector virus, and it trashed everything in sight – including my boot diskette when I tried to boot from a floppy.
The Maxtor HDD works best with USB2 – I had it backing up data at a speed in excess of 200MB/second, but the last two backups have seen the speed drop to 68MB/sec. – any clues as to what’s happening here?
The Maxtor HDD comes bundled with some third party software that I didn’t like. I’ve had Drive Image 2002 from PowerQuest and will upgrade to Drive Image 7.01. I like the fact that even when creating a drive image backup, you can still recover individual files – the best of both worlds, because if I have a HDD crash, I want to restore everything and not have to reinstall the OS, individual apps, and reapply all my personalised settings.
But I have a couple of questions for anyone who knows the Drive Image 7 product.
- I want to use the PQRE function to boot off a CD in case of having to recover the entire drive, but this is not included in the downloadable version. Where can I find it?
- The product seems to claim that you can image backup the drive you’re currently running from. To do that, I would imagine it having to log any changes that are being made by to the drive being backed up, and then synchronise at a “quiesce point”. (That’s how IBM’s DB2 image copy works). Whenever I try to backup my active partition, the system crashes… any clues?
I’ve not actually paid for this product yet, and I see from their website that calls to Tech Support are charged at $30 a pop. Hence my cheapskate inquiry here.
