R-Drive Image 7.3 review: A backup favorite gets even better

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I’ve truly enjoyed reviewing the various iterations of R-Drive Image — it’s been my go-to imaging/backup utility for nearly two decades. It’s a great program, and has still never created a bad backup in my hands.

However, bugs, while rapidly fixed once reported, have reared their head in my last few looks. Including one that created an endless failure loop in 7.3. Come on now…

What are R-Drive Image 7.3’s features?

The big news for this dot upgrade is expanded support for cloud storage services — including the Amazon S3 and S3-compatible repositories, something I bemoaned the lack of in my review of version 7.2. Okay, bemoaned is a bit strong. Wished for?

Also new in the cloud arena is support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, though only in R-Drive’s pricier Technician and Corporate tiers. Most end-users will be more interested in Dropbox, OneDrive, and the cheaper S3 and S3-compatibles, which the consumer program supports flawlessly.

The salient R-Drive Image features include: file, folder, partition, and whole drive imaging in both proprietary and non-proprietary VHD/VHDX formats; copying and cloning discs; a full-featured partition editor; and a bootable recovery disk with a choice between the modern and old-school, character-based interfaces.

The character-based interface (shown below) on the recovery disk is still my favorite for freaking out my friends and IT customers. Its appearance is as dated as my own, but it too is a hoot. Most users will prefer the modern interface shown in the previous image.

There are also Tasks, R-TT speak for jobs. These feature very granular scheduling and even media rotation in the pricier versions. Scripts are the same thing as tasks, but for command-line use. Yes, you can use R-Drive the old-fashioned way.

Another feature I love in R-Drive Image 7.x is its replications. These are copies of the image saved to other destinations. In other words, you can define one data set to back up, and back it up to multiple locations using the same “script,” aka job.

If you’re looking for the ability to back up non-Windows computers, the recovery disc allows you to image FAT/exFAT, NTFS, ReFS / ReFS2+ (Resilient File System, Windows 2012/2016 Server), HFS/HFS+/APFS, XFS, Little and Big Endian variants of UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris), and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS (Linux). Whew.

That said, Apple, a tough-to-love company, makes it nearly impossible to boot from unsigned media these days, so backing up your Mac using R-Drive Image no longer works. I mention this because I tried and was disappointed that the FAT32 USB boot stick didn’t even show up.

One R-Drive Image complaint is that while the program supports mounted network drives, WebDAV, and FTP, there’s no way to add files from a network location that’s not mounted as a drive letter by Windows. You can type in a network URL in the file name field for the destination though, and R-TT was asking me how to ameliorate this lack as I wrote this article. Expect this addition soon.

My only other complaint is that the program will mildly warn you, but not stop you from trying to write an image to a destination that doesn’t have room for it. The latter became particularly apparent as a flaw during testing. More on that in the performance discussion below.

You can define one data set to back up, and back it up to multiple locations using the same ‘script,’ aka job.

How easy to use is R-Drive Image 7.3?

For basic operations, R-Drive Image is quite easy to use. It walks you wizard-style through selecting files/folders, drives, or partitions, then where you want to write the resulting image. Creating recovery discs is simple as well.

Where the program could use a bit of work is in the Tasks/Scripts area. The way they’re portrayed in the interface, it’s not immediately apparent that tasks are for the GUI and scripts are for command-line use. Yes, RTFM.

I certainly appreciate that you can save ad-hoc jobs as command-line scripts, but it would be nice if you could save them as a task as well. Tasks, or recurring jobs, can only be created in the Tasks pane. This is also where you’ll find the retention options and scheduling.

I’d also like to see an “Execute” button in the task bar. As it stands, you must right-click over the task to run it. R-Drive Image doesn’t make heavy use of right-click context menus, so this wasn’t something I immediately thought of. Double-clicking starts editing. I would’ve reversed those choices.

How much is R-Drive image 7.3?

The end-user version of R-Drive Image, good for one computer is $45. The transferrable-seat Technician version is $299, the Corporate version I tested is $189, and there are multi-seat and transferrable-seat versions for $500 and $900, respectively. You can see the full list and the feature differences at this link.

How does R-Drive Image 7.3 perform?

You may notice that this section of the review isn’t titled “How fast is…?” That’s because reliability and bug-free operation are every bit as important as how quickly backups are created.

I’ve touted R-Drive Image as the most stable and reliable backup program I have ever used, and until version 7 — it was. It still is, when operations complete, but I discovered a couple of small visual glitches plus a rather large bug in testing 7.3 (7304) that I actually traced back to 7.0.

The company fixed the issues within two days, which is fantastically responsive, but they should’ve been caught by the company before release.

Basically, before the fix, if R-Drive Image ran out of room on the destination media during a file imaging task it went into a closed loop with the error dialog that you couldn’t cancel out of. I had to end the program using Task Manager. Drive and partition imaging jobs showed the error dialog, but you could cancel out of it.

Then there were the overlapping buttons shown below. Anyone using the program could spot them, which tells me that this version was likely rushed out the door.

Aside from the one fatal operational glitch and mis-drawn buttons, R-Drive Image performed as I’ve come to expect — admirably. Around a dozen operations to and from internal and external storage, NAS boxes, and online storage services (Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive) went off without a hitch. The recovery media also booted just fine and backup/restore operations were glitch-free.

In the final analysis, while the program had some issues with not enough space, all backups that succeeded retained their integrity and were mountable and restorable. That’s the most important aspect.

Should you buy R-Drive image?

Despite the glitches, which didn’t affect the ultimate sanctity of the backups, I still trust R-Drive Image’s backup engine. Additionally, with the new online support and multiple destinations per job, it’s one of the most complete backup solutions available at the price. I will continue to use and recommend it, but stop letting these faith-challenging bugs out the door, R-TT.

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