O&O DiskImage 2 Professional review

Many of us are deterred from backing up our important files by the monotony of the task - and understandably so.

Anything that makes doing it less laborious, then, is to be welcomed. Enter O&O DiskImage 2. This simple yet powerful utility allows you to make use of all the empty space on an external hard drive to back up the entire contents of your PC. Rather than having to select individual files, you create an image of the contents of your main hard disk - including Windows - which is then copied onto the external drive. When you add or update files on your PC, you can run an incremental backup to transfer only the new data.

This may sound like a complicated process, and it certainly would be without the help of a good disk imaging program. DiskImage manages to be user friendly in a couple of particular ways. Firstly, all the tasks are wizard-driven, so you're guided through the process of creating an image from start to finish. Secondly, if you do get stuck, there's an excellent illustrated help file - something of a rarity in programs of this sort.

To create an image, you first make sure your external hard disk is connected, then start the Create New Image wizard. This asks you to select the your source drive - the one you want to copy - then the destination, and you're done. On our pretty average 1GB Vista laptop it took an hour for 30GB of data to be imaged using the default level of compression, resulting in a 22GB file. The process would be faster if this was turned off, and with large external hard disks getting very affordable, compression isn't so essential. If you want to use smaller media such as DVDs or even CDs, the image can be split into chunks sized to fit. Encryption is offered to prevent anyone else accessing your backup. You can also create an 'image profile' to leave out certain file types.

DiskImage isn't the most comprehensive program of its kind, but it's notably easy to use and does the job.