[Software] R-Drive Image review: Our favorite backup gets even better

[Aronus]

Face it, no one really needs to pay for backup these days, yet I recommend that you plop down the $45 that will get you R-Drive Image. Why? Because it’s the only Windows backup solution that I’ve ever tried that hasn’t let me down in one way or another.

In fact, I use R-Drive Image for backing up my backups. Additionally, if there’s failing media involved, R-Drive is definitely what I reach for. If you’re already familiar with R-Drive Image and only want details about version 7.2’s new features, skip down to the “What’s new….” section.

R-Drive Image’s bread and butter is creating drive and partition images — i.e. copies of everything contained on a disk or one of its subdivisions, including boot records. It creates full (all data), incremental (all data changed since the last image), or differential (all data changed since the original full image) types.

The resulting images can be in R-Drive Image’s own format as well as the more common Microsoft VHD/VHDX formats. Pricier versions support VMDK.

The program will also verify said images, restore them whole, copy disk-to-disk (cloning), and mount its proprietary images as virtual disks that you can browse and recover individual files and folders using Windows Explorer. Note that Windows itself can mount VHD/VHDX formats, but R-Drive will mount those as well.

 

R-Drive Image review: Our favorite backup gets even better | PCWorld