15-Minute Reviews :: Keriver Image v1.0

Hello all and welcome to another edition of the 15-Minute Review system. Today’s application is Keriver Imager version 1.0 by Keriver.com – A hard drive imaging and restoration application.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states: (Partial)

“Keriver Image is a cloning or imaging utility to Protect Yourself from Important Data Losses. It would provides the ability to backup the entire contents of disks and partitions. The contents are saved as a image file that can later be restored to a disk or partition.

As a backup program for disaster recovery. If your disk or partition is no longer accessible due to corruption of the disk’s system area or file system, and you previously created a disk image or partition image file, you can use that image file to restore the disk or partition. If the disk or partition is physically damaged, you can use the image file to restore the disk or partition to a different hard disk.”

Quick Pros

• Comes as a ‘Recovery CD’, which allows you to restore from an image if your system won’t boot
• Process is fairly straight-forward for backing up and restoring
• USB drive usability (Both in Recovery CD as well as the Windows application)
• Ability to ‘browse’ the backup extremely useful – It mounts the image as an individual drive
• Application allows you to ‘segment’ the backup files so that they can fit on DVD or CD
• Process is fairly quick as well (7.79GB – High Compression in under 8 minutes)

Quick Cons

• Wish there was an option for incremental backups and scheduler
• Would not detect my second drive (PATA) from bootdisk
• Not sure why a driver has to be in place to create an image
• Bit irritating having to input serial number twice

Expansion

With Norton Ghost ruling imaging for quite a few years, they are slowly losing their grip within the home or small-business setting. With various backup tools which do a great job of backing up, most people’s needs are met without spending $70 to do so either. Keriver Image attempts to bust directly onto Norton Ghost Personal by offering a lot of the same features as Ghost, while throwing in a bit extra, while trying to keep the price down.

While the interface isn’t the best-looking (Windows application or the boot disc,) it is functional for what it needs to do. The process of backing up or restoring is very straightforward in both the Windows application as well as the Recovery CD (Which is built on linux.) It walks you through a few steps, and you are on your way. It works much like Ghost Personal would for the most part.

This application, besides its standard features, does have a few extra bells and whistles which may be handy to home or small- to medium-size business users. While there is no networking support, you can back up to and recover from USB drives (Handy for those who wield an external hard drive.) This could be useful for those who may be setting up a computer lab and don’t want to be messing with multiple CDs/DVDs (Especially with Vista’s hefty 15GB install alone.) There is also the ability to browse the backup once done using the included program, which makes this an effective method of fully backing up a drive while leaving the data intact for quick file-grabs (such as deleting your company logo or similar event on accident.) The application, to allow you to access your backed-up data, actually mounts the images to a drive letter of your choosing so that you can access it just like a regular drive. The files also segment on their own but give you the option of how big the segments are; This can be useful for those who wish to backup to CD or DVD as well by just copying the final files one at a time to blank CDs/DVDs in a CD-burning application.

That said, when I installed the Windows application for the first time, it required me to reboot because it had installed a driver to help it back up your drives. I am nost sure why this was needed as since Ghost does not use this for Windows. It was required as well – It would not let me run the Windows application without rebooting to load the driver. When that was done with the reboot, I ran a backup on one of my data drives, sitting at 7.79GB using High Compression. It took under 8 minutes to perform its task, and compressed to 6.09GB (Which I thought was pretty good, because most of that drive is my photography.)

I headed over to the Recovery CD, and it launched fine. I went to try to test a backup in the console, but already spotted an issue. While it saw my drives, it would not allow you to back up one of my drives, labelling it as an ‘unknown’ filesystem. With this, I could not back up to it either, nor recover from it. I tried messing around a bit, but in the end I could not get it to work at all. I scanned it when I returned to Windows, and it turned out fine, so I do not know what the issue was.

While this application does well at what it is aimed at, it is lacking some features that would have been nice. Scheduling backups would have been very handy indeed, especially for handing a drive which may have critical business files. Would have also been nice to have an incremental backup function as well; While it is fine for doing full backups, they are more time-consuming to perform (and resource-consuming if you keep all your backups) than incremental backups.

Final Verdict

All in all, I feel that this application does do a pretty good job. While I did not have the opportunity to test the recovery portion of the application (I don’t have my new Virtual PC setup running quite yet,) the backing up and explorer portions work pretty good. As for the Recovery CD portion of the application; I do not know why it was not detecting the filesystem on my one drive, but it does make me cautious about backing up from the CD. With that said, the recovery using the CD shouldn’t be a big deal. While free, it would be good for anyone who might have (or thought of getting) Norton Ghost, or anyone who wants to do real backups that don’t require you to reinstall your system before restoring. I think this application, while still maturing, will be a good alternative to Ghost; With a price difference of $45 ($15 to $69.99,) I do feel that this application is worth the price, even with a bit of a lack of some features and the minor bug which may be attributable to my system setup.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, June 06, 2007