Avanquest DriveClone Pro

Name: Avanquest DriveClone Pro
Rating: 3.00
Author: Jon L. Jacobi

DriveClone Pro offers both imaging and file backup, incremental backup, and a hidden automatic restore partition.

Jon L. Jacobi

PC Advisor (UK)

03/02/09

Expert Rating

3.00 / 5

Pros

More expensive than the majority of the competition

Cons

Translation and operational glitches

Bottom Line

Aside from the worrisome translation and operational glitches, DriveClone Pro works fairly well and it's easier to use than True Image. But it's also more expensive than the majority of the competition, and backing up in parallel via FTP isn't enough to warrant the extra cost - especially for a program that appears to have been pushed out the door a couple of weeks shy of readiness. It's a pity; with a little more work, DriveClone Pro might not be singing the sad song of the second fiddle.

Would you buy this?

Yes 0
No 0

Price
$ 45.28 (AUD)

DriveClone Pro offers both imaging and file backup, incremental backup, and a hidden automatic restore partition.

In sales, DriveClone Pro has been playing second fiddle to Acronis True Image. As of this latest version, though DriveClone Pro is largely on par with its rival feature-wise.

DriveClone Pro offers both imaging and file backup, incremental backup, and a hidden automatic restore partition.

Also, DriveClone Pro's also the easiest of all the imaging programs to learn and use - despite some translation errata. Alas, there were enough error messages (non-fatal) that we can't fully recommend it as of this writing.

Aside from the DriveClone Pro interface's less-than-optimal translation to English, the install complained that with 450MB of disk space available there was not enough room - despite Farstone's claimed requirement of only 130MB.

We received a "communications or connectivity" error after both of our test backups. The progress bar during erasing and creating a recovery CD-RW both stalled at 99% though the operations had actually succeeded. Small as these problems may be, when we trust a program to do our backing up, we want it Bulletproof with a capital "B".

Like Norton's imaging products, the Windows version of DriveClone Pro can't run on systems with less that 512MB of memory - a bummer for IT types who need to back up older, less beefy systems. The Windows PE-based recovery disc is no help in this regard; it's restore-only.