Data and system recovery software is an essential product to keep on your shelf. Granted, you'll feel slightly aggrieved for shelling out on a piece of software that you may never use, but if you do suffer a total system crash then it can become worth hundreds of pounds - maybe even priceless to you in the struggle to rescue your sensitive data.
Recovering those precious files successfully after a data disaster is one thing, but programs that'll transfer everything to a new hard drive - when upgrading to a new PC, for instance - can be hard to operate. Avanquest's Disk Copy & Clean aims to fill this role and redress the balance with ease-of-use, but in doing so it neglects the area of system recovery.
Partitioning, data transfer and system recovery all go hand-in-hand, and suites such as Paragon's Hard Disk Manager offer these in one neat package that covers all the bases.
Expandable option
Disk Copy & Clean may not offer the value of whole system recovery suites, but as a piece of copying software it performs well and has a neat feature in its ability to expand partitions quickly to fit a new drive. We tested it on a massive terabyte drive and were impressed by the way we could restructure data on the new disk to fit it onto new partitions.
Disk Copy & Clean runs off a live CD, which solves the problem of installing extra software when modifying whole drives. Disks are pre-scanned for bad sectors prior to copying, ensuring that your data is ported across and any errors are neatly avoided. The one-click copy wizard couldn't be simpler, but apart from the partition option the copying process doesn't leave much room for experienced users to tinker with advanced drive settings.
At £20 you can argue that Disk Copy & Clean is money well spent. At a stroke you can transfer all your data to a new drive and not have to worry about dealing with partitions that you do or don't want. However, with complete disk management suites available for just a little more money, Disk Copy & Clean's long-term usefulness is under significant threat.
Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
thebill
February 21st 2010
1. I'm currently using this product to copy data from an 80 GB internal drive to a 160 GB external drive for my Lenovo ThinkPad T60. The intent is to replace the factory installed 80 GB drive with the 160 GB. The 80 GB drive is installed in the internal bay and the 160 GB is installed in a Thermaltake BlacX SATA/USB enclosure attached via USB 2.0 port. Launching the copy was very easy. Just boot from the CD-ROM and select the source and target drives. The problem is that the copy is VERY SLOW. I started the process around 7:00 PM on 2/19. It's now 10:40 AM on 2/21 and the copy is still running. The onscreen messages don't provide enough detail on the actual status of the copy. I can't tell if the copy is done and the program is now expanding the filesystem on the target drive from 80 GB to 160 GB because that level of detail isn't provided. The copy seems to have started over because the counters and timers reset about an hour ago. I'm not sure if my issues are due to the hardware configuration I'm using, but this would seem to be a standard config to copy data between drives. There's no way to check on more detailed status because the keyboard and touchpad are non-responsive. I'm assuming that whatever OS kernel is loaded by the bootable CD isn't suited for multi-tasking. For $30US, it's not a big investment, but I'm hoping I don't have to use it very often. I'll post again if the copy ever completes.
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments