R-Drive Image Reviewer's Comments

R–Drive by R–tools Technology provides a few helpful features to protect your data, but the program falls short compared to the competition.

Feature Set:  

R–Drive can protect your backup image with a password, create incremental images of your drives or replace an existing drive with a new one.

With R–Drive, you can also connect to a virtual disk and create a startup disk. Beyond this, there is little customization available.

Ease of Use:  

The R–Drive control panel is clean and simple—you start in the action selection screen—but the process to create an image backup can be confusing. After you've selected the partition or drive you want imaged, you must search through a file tree for the image destination. Once you've selected the destination, you must manually type in a name for the backup instead of receiving a default name automatically. These extra steps took time.

Also, R–Drive had a difficult time locating the DVD drive we planned to write to while imaging to disk—this should be automatic. If you don't understand that you have to type in a name manually, you might think R–Drive can't backup to a particular drive.

Backup/Restore Process:  

Creating an image backup to a local drive or network drive takes around 40 minutes or more depending on the size of the partition, and a backup image to a CD–ROM is slightly slower then our #1 ranked product, but tracking the process would be simpler if R–Drive provided more statistics during the burn.

Help/Support:  

R–Drive has easy access to help during any part of their imaging process. If you're in the middle of a step, such as setting up, you can press the help button and it will take you to relevant help topics.

Finding a direct connection to technical support is tricky, though. You can't simply find a link under the help button, you must choose the about button, find the link for the website, technical support and sales department.

Summary:  

With some minor improvements, R–Drive has the potential to become an excellent disk imaging program. R–Drive is already equipped with some quality features, but for the price, higher–ranked products like Acronis True Image and Drive Backup offer a better value.