You're never alone with a clone

The Register's new Enterprise Storage Channel

If you think that bit-copying hard disks is only for cloning drives or PCs, then PowerQuest (www.powerquest.com) wants you to think again. It reckons there is a lot going for it in the backup market as well, where a snapshot disk image can be used to quickly restore a complete server or just selected files.

The company's CTO and storage products veep Don Kleinschnitz describes its V2i (virtual volume imaging) Protector software as "an innovative use of mature technology," capable of imaging 2GB per minute into a compressed file which can be saved to another drive on the same server or to a NAS box out on the network.

The 'mature technology' he refers to is PowerQuest's DriveImage, which is widely used for tasks such as creating and copying standard software installations for corporate PCs.

Kleinschnitz adds that the advantage of imaging is that it copies everything, including hidden system files, configuration settings and so on, where file-based backup programs only copy what you tell them to.

"The bandwidth is the same however you backup," he says. "The difference is your ability to reconstruct and restore."

PowerQuest's recent acquisition of software developer Cognet will allow it to build policy-based automation into V2i Protector, plus the ability to do incremental backups and roll-backs, deploy programs and analyse software usage.

"We are exclusively for Windows now," Kleinschnitz adds, "but we plan to add Linux clients next year, for as many flavours as we can."