We've covered Perfect Image 11 before on IT Reviews and to summarise, we thought the program was a good image backup tool, though limited in how it could access a drive image, once created. It's a rival to products like Acronis TrueImage and Norton's Save & Restore and copes well with most image backup tasks.

While its image backup facilities are good, it doesn't appear to be possible to access an image to extract individual files, rather than restoring the entire image. This is something the Acronis product can do, for example. The file back-up facilities are also a little rudimentary with Perfect Image relying instead on the bundled utility, AutoSave.

AutoSave is a clever program that automatically takes a second copy of any file saved to the drive or folders you specify. For example, you can set it to duplicate any files saved in My Documents (or its sub-folders) to another internal, external or networked drive.

Avanquest, the publisher of the suite, works with Paragon, the maker of Perfect Image, but has added a companion utility from VCom, which it bought three years ago, called DiskCopy and Clean.

As the name suggests, DiskCopy and Clean is designed for copying the complete contents of a hard drive to another location. Its most obvious use is when upgrading a hard drive, particularly a primary hard drive - the one you start your PC from. Using DiskCopy and Clean you can copy everything from your current hard drive to a new one and create new partitions on the drive as well.

This all happens from a Windows-like graphical interface which pops up when a machine is started from the DiskCopy and Clean CD. If you're installing a larger hard drive - the usual scenario - the program copies the drive image but also formats the remainder of the drive so you have access to its full capacity.

Once the new disk is up and running, the old one can be removed, but you may want to wipe the contents first. This is important if the old drive will be used in a machine leaving your house or company. Perhaps you're donating an old machine to a charity or selling it on; you don't want them to have your data as well as the kit.

The 'Clean' part of DiskCopy and Clean erases a hard drive to the relevant US MIL spec, making it very difficult to recover any data from it.

Separately, the two products that make up this suite cost £40 and £15, so there's a saving to be had in the combination. Both utilities are worth having, though in comparison with its two main rivals, Perfect Image doesn't offer the same sophistication and scheduling of file copying. The AutoSave utility is a particularly quick way of setting up automatic file backup, though.