NovaStor Instant Recovery Simple Installation Douglas Smith
Instant Recovery is very simple to use and works with all Intel-compatible systems.
To Install: just insert the CD to create a bootable recovery disk. Restart and allow the system to boot from the startup disk, which goes through a simple setup and configuration. Select the type of media to use for recovery purposes.
Having set up the configuration, select the partitions or entire drives to save to image. Choose compression if needed, and optionally set a password to limit access to the image.
Easy to Use Even a novice should have no problem setting up, since the program has built-in, automatic speed detection for CD-R/RW drives and supports recovery to drives larger than the one you are making the image from. Instant Recovery supports SCSI/ and IDE/ATAPI devices; spanning across multiple media is also possible.
The product uses error checking and verification, and the Disk Copy feature can clone one drive to another. One feature we found helpful was the ability to adjust compression on the fly, something most image-creating software doesn't support.
Problems We did find some areas that we didn't like, though. When booting to the Instant Recovery disk, sometimes it didn't work quite as expected. On several occasions the computer seemed to just freeze while loading, forcing us to shut it off during test. After getting to the main interface things seemed to work properly, however.
Users should also note that the level of compression just might not be enough. We made an image of a partition of about 5 Gig on a drive with about 10 Gig. We would have appreciated a higher compression ratio, since it took CD after CD in to get a complete image--bout 9 CDs total. Hopefully compression levels will be improved.
Compatibility was great, however: we used several OSes and all backed up fine. Instant Recovery handles Windows3.x/95/98/Me/2000/NT | DOS | Linux | Unix | OS2, and itself uses very little disk space, since its bootable media is just a floppy disk.
