Is Image for Windows a good drive image backup?

IFW or IFD ?

Let me approach this from another angle... Given that I will be backing up my notebook's hard drive onto DVDs on a monthly basis, do you users suggest I do it from within Windows or booting from a CD (as there isn't a floppy in my notebook)?

...and if booting from a CD is better, shouldn't I use IFD instead of IFW?

 

Imaging from outside of Windows reduces the possibility of corruption due to Windows accessing data on the disk during backup. That said, I haven't seen any problems on my computer when imaging from Windows (using PHYlock).

Image for Windows license includes a copy of Image for Dos. I would recommend buying / using Image for Windows

 

My positive vote also goes out for the IFW/IFD package. It made a great replacement for an immature release of TI 9.

If you boot from CD or diskette, you WILL be using IFD. IFW is only for running within windows.

See http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/imagemanual.pdf

Although I don't do backups to optical media, my GUESS would be that, if it works with your DVD writer, backing up with IFW would be faster but backing up from IFD could be less riskier -- I'll defer to those with firsthand experience backing up to optical media to give you a more authoritative answer.

 

Everyone seems to be saying IFW can create images to cd/dvd, and that's a great feature, but can you also create images directly to a 2nd internal hard drive or external hard drive, and restore the images directly from one of those drives too?

 

Yep. Folks' mileage varies with many softwares versus their own external hard drives but it works a treat with my external USB2 320GB Ion Drive (IOGEAR-Western Digital) and my external USB2 400GB Seagate as well as my internal hard drives.

 

No problems for me using IFW when backing up to DVD / Internal Disk

 

Someone asked about the speed of imaging/restoring. That's kind of hard to answer as much of that depends on the specs of your system. On my system, Powerquest's Drive Image (not the new version) is the fastest at creating images and restoring. But, no support for native boot from DVD or external hard drive. IFW is a close second, with TI falling in third. I don't mess with anything else now but IFW. It's an excellent program, and a steal at only $27.

 

Where can you buy it for $27?

On the web site http://terabyteunlimited.com/purchimg.html IFW is $38.94 and IFD is $29.95.

 

The post you are referring to at $27.00 was january of 2006.
It's gone up. Still a good program though.

 

A couple of thoughts...

Firstly, I initially used Image for Windows but have totally migrated to Image for DOS/Image for Linux. I like the fact it doesn't even need to be installed... just runs from the boot CD. I back up to either DVD (every month or so) or my external HD (weekly.) Great products!

Lastly, the price increases may have something to do with us! We have gotten the word out that at the earlier prices, these programs were a steal! But IMO, even with the increases, when compared to others in the market, IFD/IFL/IFW are still great deals!

 

I did think of just buying IFD but there is only $8.99 difference to get IFW also.

 

So well worth buying IFW

You will also be eligible for a free upgrade to the new version 2, which may be out early this year.

 

I have recently switched from Acronis TI to IFW/IFD/IFL and am very happy that I did. I do most of my imaging with IFW + PHYLOCK (as it will ignore the pagefile and hibernation file) and do all my restoring with IFD.

I find IFW/IFD to be quicker at both imaging and restoring when compared to TI. Also, IFW/IFD "just work".

The new version 2 of IFW/IFD is due to be released soon and will include differential backups, among other things.

I'm also hoping IFD/IFL will support excluding the pagefile and hibernation file.

 

yep, way faster than ati on my system as well. ive been doing image/restores at least 10 times a day the past week, no problems whatsoever.

i didnt know the v2 coming, looking forward to that too.

 

That was exactly my plan too, until I found out IFD would not see my External USB2.0 drive because of USB 1.1 computer even with a PCMCIA USB 2.0 adaptor.
Support told me to use the UHC1=1 switch but doesnt work.
Back to ATI.........

 

Do you mean UCHI=1, as UHC1=1 would do nothing ?

 

Strange that it didn't work for you. I did a one time test of my ancient 98SE laptop just to see if the USB 1.1 switch would work and the image creation ran fine. Pretty slow but fine.

I didn't use any special adapter. Just hooked things up and tried it...