Christmas Giveaway Perfect Image And Partition Commander

Today's Christmas Giveaway is a split review and giveaway of Perfect Image 12 and Partition Commander 11. Both software programs are developed by Avanquest and serve different purposes.

Perfect Image 12 is a Windows backup software that can be used to backup data efficiently, so that you can restore it at a later point in time should the need arise.

Perfect Image 12 comes with all the tools needed to perform data backups and data recovery. The main interface displays a sidebar menu with the tasks and options provided by the program and a main area with information about the various hard drives on startup.

The sidebar is divided into the categories Basic and Advanced Backup Tasks, Restore Tasks, Tools and News and Documentation. Each category can be minimized to safe screen estate.

The Basic Backup Task category contains links to backing up a disk or partition, scheduling a backup or backing up files. A click on any of those will open a Backup Wizard that is guiding the user through the backup creation process.

The screenshot above shows the first page of the disk and partition backup wizard. One useful feature of the program is that Perfect Image will estimate the resulting image size. This can be very helpful to determine the storage capacities that are needed to store the backup.

Advanced settings like changing the compression level of the backup image, splitting large backup into files, password protecting backups or excluding files or folders from the backup are accessible by making a checkmark in the change backup settings option on the same page.

The backup data can be saved to a local or network drive or burned to CD or DVD. The File backup wizard comes with additional comfortable options to use so called include masks to select specific file types from the selected folders that should be backed up. Four default masks are available including photos, video, audio and readable (documents) files. It is possible to create new include masks for specific needs, e.g. programming files.

Another option are exclude masks that can block certain file types from being included in the backup; Again with the option to create custom filters.

The Advanced Backup Tools offer differential and incremental backups on top of the basic backup options. Differential backups contain only the files and folders that have changed since the last backup. This reduces the size of the backup and the time it takes to create it. Basically a cumulative backup of all changes since the last backup.

Incremental backups on the other hand will only backup files that have not been backed up before.

Here are additional features of Perfect Image:

Perfect Image Features

• Secure Partition - You can create a special secure partition on your hard disk to store disk backup images.
• Real-time Hard Disk Image Backup - Using different hard disk imaging modes, Perfect Image is able to backup any file system you use. For Windows' partitions you can create complete system backup images with no need to reboot Windows or close any application
• Hard Disk Cloning - You can easily clone your old hard disk to deploy a new one, eliminating tiresome and time consuming operating system and application installation and adjustments.
• USB Recovery Media Builder - The Recovery Media Builder allows the user to create bootable recovery media on a USB flash drive, then boot the PC and perform any operations directly from flash drive in case of operating system corruption or boot problems.
• Blu-ray Disk Backup Support - Burn your backup archives to Blu-ray discs. A single layer disc can store 25 GB, more than five times the capacity of a single layer DVD.
• Verify Image Integrity - Verify the integrity of a backup.
• Create Recovery Disks - Create a recovery disk to restore a backup independently from the operating system.
• Restore Individual Files - Restore individual files from backups.

Perfect Image 12 is a sophisticated backup software for the Windows operating system.

Partition Commander Review

Partition Commander 11 is the second program in this giveaway. It is - as the name suggests - a partitioning program for the Windows operating system that comes with additional cloning, migration and backup tools.

The main purpose of Partition Commander is to create, resize, delete and merge partitions in the Windows operating system. Some possible applications include dividing a large hard drive into two smaller partitions or reclaiming unused disk space after deleting a partition that is no longer needed.

What makes this product interesting however are the additional options that are provided. It can for instance be used to migrate data to a new hard disk that can be of the same or a different size than the original (the size needs to be larger obviously than the size of the old hard drive).

Other interesting and helpful options provided by Partition Commander include:

• System Back-Up & Restore - Partition Commander 11 now includes the ability to create a complete backup of your system before applying any modification/creation of a partition.
• Boot Manager & OS Installation Wizard - It’s never been so easy to install a new Operating System on your PC. Partition Commander 11 guides you through the entire process, even if one or multiple operating systems are already running on your PC.
• Mac OSX Boot Camp support - Partition Commander allows you to resize the partitions between the Mac OSX partition, and the Windows on

Partition Commander 11 is an easy to use partition manager that comes with several additional options and tools that aid the user in specific tasks that are related to hard drives (like migrating, cloning or installing a new operating system). Advanced users can switch to an advanced view that provides access to additional configuration options.

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