Online Backup Guide

Just when I almost decided to get back to the Stone Age and carve out all my data on the cave walls (just because of the frustrating system crashes caused by the viruses created by great minds of the 21st century), I stumbled upon the DriveClone Pro 5… well, not all great minds are busy creating viruses!

Honestly, it is not always a virus that can cause a trouble. A hard drive crash (can be due to any reason) or a system upgrade can lead to a loss of data and these situations are very well handled by the new DriveClone Pro 5 from FarStone Technology. The numerous back up facilities bundled in the software makes it a popular individual for system back up among others in the same category.

FEATURES:

Even before it was out of the box, the DriveClone Pro 5 toke me by surprise and I was on the cloud 9 to find that it has a Vista support and a support for Raid configuration! Though I did not have enough interest in Raid, Vista compatibility made me happy! The most important features (as listed by FarStone) of the DriveClone Pro 5 are:

• Snapshot: It has a built in ability to automatically monitor all the changes in sector level on a hard drive.
• Universal Restore: Restores all the files or the entire hard drive on the system.
• Migration to a new HDD: Copy the entire system settings and the entire HDD partition without even installing the OS!
• Disk Imaging within Windows: Most of the disk imaging tasks are performed by the software.
• Incremental back up: It has the capability of tracking only the changes made since the last back up.
• Bare Metal Disaster Recovery: Recovers the entire system after a major system crash.

Drive Clone Pro 5 RestoreIT Professional

EXPERIENCE:

Booo! Nothing can be perfect and this is true for DriveClone Pro 5 as well! But before I ponder on the problem that I faced, I will like to share things which I liked most. The first thing I noticed is the interface and take it, even if you are not an expert, you can use it like a professional! It is not at all notoriously difficult! It also made an exact copy of my hard drive and the system settings and all the information about the partition and saved it allowed me to save it as a bootable disk image. Guess what? The next thing that I found was even more interesting.

The disk image (that I created with its help though) could be saved on a network share or on a USB HDD or it can be copied on a CD or DVD with the help of a built-in burner. And about the flexibility, the more I say, the more you think that I am insane but the truth is not going to change! I actually had an option to either back up a single partition or the complete HDD.

Drive Clone Pro 5 USB Settings

Ah! My lappe (laptop) really loved it because it did not have to go through the complete OS install after I changed the old HDD. I simply transferred the entire image to new out of the box HDD. A couple of days later I found that the it can create a bootable recovery disc directly from the software and also, it is capable of recovering the disk image in a pre-OS mode so that your system is up and running even after a major and complete system crash! About the speed of data recovery, because it supports UDMA1-5 to restore data in the different sectors and this really speeds up the data recovery.

Also not to forget the amazing support for a wide range of partition formats, it is capable of supporting FAT32, NTFS, LinuxEXT2/3 and other unknown partitions as well! Whether your computer is an old guy or a new freak, you will again have a reason to love the DriveClone Pro 5 software. It supports IDE, SATA, EIDE and SCSI HDDs. Even a Raid 0/1 support is there.

What I disliked is that it cannot restore images having more than 2 GB of size directly from a network! Doh! It freezes! I really hate this system and I believe that FarStone Technology must take care of this problem.

CONCLUSION:

Finally, what I found out is that the DriveClone Pro 5 is by far one of the best of its kind in the market and has an extensive set of features to meet almost all the needs of an user!