Thread: 0&0 Disklmage Professional v 3.0

The best way to protect your system is to use an image utility. We take a look at 0&0 Disklmage to find out if this solution to automatically start safeguarding at the preset timings is worth it.

Features

0&0 Disklmage is another program that has gone the Office 2007 way, in adopting the ribbon style layout. Among the things that it can do includes 'Imaging' that can create an image of one or more drives, 'Restoration' can restore one or more drives to its original condition, 'Cloning' creates a perfect copy of any disk or volume, 'Mount' a drive from an existing image file, and 'Burn' the image file to a CD or DVD.

There are four types of image files that are created during the imaging process: they are Used Sector Imaging, Forensic Imaging, Direct Forensic Imaging and Incremental Imaging. The image files can then be compressed and split. The security feature allows encryption to protect data from unauthorized access with the AES 128/192/256 algorithms. The image files created can also be customized with appropriate filters to save storage space and computing time.



limits the imaging process to only used sectors on a drive, thereby saving time, system resources and disk space. In Forensic Imaging, an exact sector level copy of the source drive is created, saving all sectors of a partition or drive, including the unoccupied and deleted portions. Direct Forensic Imaging process is similar to its predecessor, except that data is read through a low¬level system interface. When encryption software is in use on a system this makes it possible to create an image that includes encrypted and hidden files. Incremental Imaging method creates an image that only contains the changes made to a base image or a previous incremental image.

Performance

Unfortunately, the imaging process is not very well implemented in Disklmage. The application failed to execute certain tasks in our test. in spite of a confirmation dialog. The application also takes its time to create an image file, compared to the ten minutes taken by its rival Acronis True Image, to image a partition sized at 12
GB. Furthermore, the incremental imaging method, that's supposed to save changes made to a base or another incremental image, took about 20 minutes to complete.
The Forensic Imaging process was another letdown. While theoretically, it means that the user can recover files from an image, in reality, sifting through the image files with a special data recovery program is hard. The first step proved to be an obstacle, that required the image be mounted in Windows as a virtual drive. In the test, ten new drives were displayed in 'My Computer' though we wanted to load only one virtual drive.

VERDICT:

The new Disklmage 3 professional is ill-conceived, though it performs the basic operations well.

FOR:

Integrated creating and restoring images of drives or partitions.

AGAINST:

Needs more tweaking before it can be considered perfect.