7tools Partition Imager Reviewer's Comments

7tools Partition Imager 2005 by Paragon Technologie GmbH provides features to create a disk image of your hard drive and the ability to copy a disk image to several computers at the same time.

Feature Set:  

Not only does 7tools Partition Imager 2005 create an image of your existing hard drive, the program also has the ability to create, format, or delete a hard drive. If you're restoring an image across a network, you can multicast the partition or disk image to several computers as well as change the SID (security identifier) for each. You can also split images, and opt to only copy necessary files. You can even copy a damaged disk with bad sectors.

However, two drawbacks of 7tools Partition Imager 2005 is that this disk imaging software can't do incremental backups and you cannot schedule automatic backups.

Ease of Use:  

The 7tools control panel is not as simple to use as some of the other disk imaging programs. When you create a backup image of your hard drive, it's not clear that you need to choose the burn icon button if you want to create your disk image on a CD or DVD, and the backup icon if you want to backup to a hard drive or network drive. Then you need to press the apply button to begin the actual backup.

However, formatting a new drive and deleting a drive are simple, one–step tasks. 7tools provides a colorful graphical display of the disk drives that shows your existing partitions.

Backup/Restore Process:  

Even though 7tools Partition Imager 2005 isn't as fast as our higher–ranked disk imaging products, they do provide the tools necessary to give the user the information to keep from guessing how long it's going to take. 7tools displays the time elapsed as well the time to finish the amount of data read so far, written so far, copied so far, and the amount needed to still copy. It took 40 minutes to create an image of our 34.5 GB hard drive.

We had difficulties during image burning when we inserted a full disk instead of a blank one; 7tools was unable to handle the error. 7tools to remained in the same burn process and we were unable to eject the CD. After we straightened this out, we created a full backup to disk, but this took 1 hour 20 minutes, longer than any disk imaging software took to complete this task.

Help/Support:  

The disk imaging documentation for 7tools Partition Imager 2005 is good—the program offers relevant content, a complete index and a search tool—but Paragon Technologie GmbH doesn't offer online support, such as a FAQ page, forums and online tutorials.

Summary:  

7tools Partition Imager 2005 has the potential to be a great disk imaging product, but the program cannot schedule backups or create incremental backups. We also felt that the process to create a disk image could be simpler.