DiskImage 18 Professional

Full product, worth £36 oo-software.com REQUIRES

Windows 10 or later; 250MB hard drive space; online registration

If you’ve ever suffered the shock of data loss or had to spend hours recovering your system after a crash or drive corruption, you’ll already know how important it is to make and maintain a regular backup. Ideally encompassing every aspect of your system, not just your work files and photos.

Having a fallback copy of Windows – including all your favourite apps and settings, along with your irreplaceable documents, media and other files – is a no-brainer. But with so many options, what’s the best way to set this up?

O&O DiskImage Professional features all the tools you need for backing up individual files and folders, and creating images of entire partitions and drives. Hints and tips guide you through the process of protecting your data, and the latest version features a new Windows 11-style interface.

After installing and launching the suite, you can get started by clicking on the appropriate tile, such as drive imaging, file backup, one-click imaging or bootable recovery disk creation.

Choose the imaging option and you can create an image of any drive connected to your PC quickly and easily. Alternatively, select a source drive or volume and click “Start drive imaging” to make a full backup using the program’s default settings.

You can also back up individual files and folders. The process is immediately familiar, as you can browse through your files inside a File Explorertype interface, and tick the ones you want to secure.

You can create a complete backup or save space with incremental or differential copying; you can also compress or encrypt your archives.

Once you’ve created your archive, DiskImage also offers all the tools you need to manage and restore your data. You can recover entire images or select individual files and folders, or even mount your image files in Windows, and access them like a regular external drive.

ABOVE You can easily create images of entire drives – or even multiple disks at once – and specify individual partitions to be backed up

ABOVE If you just want to back up the odd folder or a handful of items, you can select them from an intuitive file-selection interface

ABOVE Prepare for a disaster you hope will never occur by using DiskImage to create bootable recovery media