DriveClone's Got Your Backup

FarStone's DriveClone Pro is one of the easiest-to-use hard-drive imaging and backup offerings on the market. The software installs in seconds and provides many useful, quick data-transfer capabilities.

Before installing DriveClone on an operating system, FarStone recommends disabling the System Restore and the Scheduled Defragmentation. Installing the software in a non-system partition yields the best results. However, it also is recommended to set a secured area on a system partition to collect snapshots.

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CRN Test Center engineers recommend placing a pseudo drive in the secured area to eliminate temporary OS files from overwhelming a backup process. Essentially, the pseudo drive collects temporary files and reduces the size of snapshots.

The Snapshots feature allows system builders to create startup discs and select multiple images during a boot process. The software also has a rescue tool that can be burned onto CDs to recover a master boot record state if it has been altered during installation.

One mistake users make is restoring a single drive without paying close attention to the selection options. If a user chooses a 'C drive only' restore, DriveClone will restore only the files on the system drive and any previous snapshots will restore just the C drive. Users can mistakenly lock themselves into a single-drive restoration this way.

To speed the backup process on multiple drives and ensure it does not interfere with business, DriveClone provides its own version of My Computer, which has pre-set schedules. If a system is shutdown before the backup process, DriveClone will run it during Windows Startup. The backup process also is triggered if the time on the OS is changed past DriveClone's pre-set schedule.