Some Technical Background
My choice of Web browser is dictated by my “wide-gamut” monitor.
What does that mean? First, a gamut is the range of colors that a monitor or printer can display. It’s also the range of colors contained in a color space. A color space is a mathematical scheme for representing colors as numbers, typically triads of eight- or sixteen-bit red, green, and blue values for each pixel in an image.
Most monitors have a fairly narrow gamut, approximating a color space called sRGB. Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft developed sRGB in 1996 as a “lowest common denominator” standard for images on the nascent World Wide Web, based on the color rendition of the CRT (picture tube) monitors available at the time. sRGB is certainly adequate for many kinds of pictures. That’s why it remains the standard for nearly all images on the Web, as well as the default color space— and often the only available one— for digital cameras.
But sRGB’s narrow gamut lacks many saturated (bright or vivid) colors found in nature and in color photographs, which means monitors can’t display them. The closest it gets to a vivid green is distinctly yellowish. Deep blue sky can turn purple or gunmetal gray. And if your love is like a red, red rose, it might turn into a featureless red blob. The details of the petals are differentiated in colors well outside the sRGB gamut.
A wide-gamut LCD monitor can display many of the saturated colors that are outside the gamut of sRGB. But it can only do that with images that contain those colors, in a color space with a larger gamut than sRGB such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto. It also needs color managed software, such as Photoshop, that can recognize the larger color space and translate it properly into colors on the monitor. And the monitor needs to be calibrated and profiled, to tell the color management system how to do that translation. (I discuss calibration and profiling, along with more details about color management, in my review of the huey and hueyPro, two hardware devices for calibrating and profiling monitors.) All this complexity is the reason most users of digital cameras stick with sRGB.
When all those conditions are in place, a wide-gamut monitor can accurately display many more colors than a regular monitor, including saturated colors outside the sRGB gamut that some printers can put on paper. That means the petals of that red rose and individual blades of bright green grass are all visible, and the sky is the correct cobalt blue. Such a monitor lets a photographer use a larger color space than sRGB, to take better advantage of what a digital camera sensor or color film can record. (But those images need to be converted to sRGB for the Web. If they’re left in a larger color space they’ll look dull and washed-out.)
The disadvantage of a wide-gamut monitor (besides the higher cost) becomes immediately visible whenever you’re not working in Photoshop. Without color management— which, again, requires software that uses it— images take on comic-book or even psychedelic hues. Blue sky turns aquamarine, and flesh tones turn orange. Web surfing becomes something like watching an old color TV with the “tint” slightly off and the “color” knob turned up too high (if you live in North America or Japan and are old enough to remember that). Some wide-gamut monitors address this problem with a button or menu setting that restricts the gamut to sRGB. But that can cause problems with monitor calibration, especially if you forget to restore the wide gamut before a Photoshop session.
Browser Color Management
A better solution is a color-managed Web browser that can display images correctly. Fortunately, the current versions of all the major browsers support some kind of color management. Unfortunately, only one of them has a complete implementation of color management that’s actually usable for wide-gamut monitors.
A color-managed browser needs to do to things. First, it needs to recognize images containing a profile that specifies the color space, and use that profile in conjunction with the monitor’s profile to display the colors correctly. The second thing is much more important, since practically none of the billions of images on the Web include profiles. The browser needs to assume that any image without a profile is sRGB, and then use the monitor’s profile to display the sRGB colors correctly. This is almost always the correct assumption, since nearly all images on the Web are sRGB.
The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox is currently the only browser that does both of those things correctly. Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer correctly displays images with profiles. But images without profiles— that is, nearly every image on the Web— display without any color management correction. Google’s Chrome can’t read profiles in image files, but it’s supposed to be able to display images (assumed to be sRGB) using a monitor profile. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make it do that. Opera has no color management capability at all, and there are apparently no plans to add it.
Of course, none of that really matters if you’ve got a normal monitor with a standard sRGB gamut. But if you’ve got a wide-gamut monitor and you’re surfing the Web with a browser other than Firefox, you might find yourself wondering whether someone spiked your coffee with LSD.
Opera was my favorite browser for years. I first started using it in 1997, running under OS/2’s Windows emulation. I found that the lean and clever Opera 2.12, though rather primitive by today’s standards, was much better than IBM’s native OS/2 version of Netscape. The installation file for Opera 2.12 fit on a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
Since then— it’s now on version 11.6, with version 12 in early testing— Opera Software, the Norwegian company that develops the browser, has emphasized usability and innovation. Opera was the first browser to include many features that are now ubiquitous, including multiple tabs, recall of recently closed tabs or windows, cookie management, pop-up suppression, ad blocking, password manager, toolbar customization, search engine bar, and page zooming. Some features remain unique to Opera, notably “mouse gestures” for page navigation that are much more useful in practice than they sound.
Opera includes settings very useful for Web development, including an option to see a page layout with labeled elements. Opera is highly compliant with HTML and CSS standards, so it’s a good test bed for Web sites intended to run on multiple browsers. That’s probably why Adobe selected Opera’s “Presto” rendering engine for their Web development applications.
The user interface, including toolbars and their layout, keyboard shortcuts, and mouse gestures, can be readily customized to fit the way you prefer to interact with the browser. There are also special options for visually-impaired users: Text, images, and Flash content can be zoomed up to 1000%, a feature I find useful even though I’m not visually-impaired. And you can select a special high-contrast font and color scheme to further optimize text for low vision. These are only some of the reasons I find Opera more pleasant to use than other browsers.
That said, Opera has one significant problem, beyond the lack of color management (which, again, doesn’t matter to the majority of users whose monitors display only the sRGB gamut). That problem isn’t with Opera itself, but with its minuscule (and declining) share of the browser market. As of December 2011, Opera had a 1.66% share of worldwide users, down from 2.17% in November 2010. That might actually be an advantage if you’re concerned about security, since hackers are less likely to bother with such an insignificant browser. (Opera’s developers have always been very good about quickly issuing updates when “exploits” are reported.)
The difficulty is that the designers of Web sites for banks, insurance companies, and other large corporations increasingly refuse to allow the use of Opera. Instead of a login page, you’ll get an ominous warning that you’re using an “obsolete,” “insecure,” or “unsupported” browser, and links to download Windows Internet Explorer or Firefox. Opera ’s developers are aware of this problem, and have long provided options to send those sites an identification string that masquerades as one of the “supported” browsers.
Some analysts insist that this “user agent spoofing” confuses the compilation of browser usage statistics, leading to a significant undercount of Opera’s actual market share. Whether or not that’s true, the subterfuge often doesn’t fool corporate Web sites that use more sophisticated checks and deny access anyway. And sometimes, even if the mask lets a user sneak through, important features of the Web site that rely on features of the impersonated browser might not work.
Opera seems to be nearing the end of a lengthy death spiral, with an accelerating loss of its remaining market share as more and more Web sites refuse to allow it. Opera could end up like the Beta video cassette format that lingered for years as a niche product after decisively losing the format war to the technically-inferior VHS.
Fortunately, Opera Software derives most of its revenue from Opera Mobile, a version bundled with various mobile phone platforms. It has at least 25% of the market share for these devices. That’s quite healthy considering the popularity of Apple’s iPhone, which has a version of Safari integrated into its operating system. There’s also Opera Mini, a mobile browser that connects to Opera’s servers that do the Web rendering and send highly compressed pages to the mobile device. The resulting savings on data charges can make it worth considering even for iPhone users.
I have long been one of the many users who assiduously avoid Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. That wasn’t merely to protest the arrogance of a company that nearly monopolized the browser market for years, not because it was the best browser but because it was heavily integrated with their monopoly operating system. That near-monopoly created the computer equivalent of an agricultural monoculture, susceptible to every virus, worm, or exploit (until Microsoft got around to patching it). Using something else provided a useful measure of protection from those hazards.
Internet Explorer also had rendering quirks and proprietary extensions that didn’t comply with standards promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium, as well as outright bugs (such as lack of support for PNG graphics). Microsoft’s attitude was that their market dominance entitled them to dictate the standards. It was thus incumbent on Web designers to build their sites around Microsoft’s browser, preferably to the exclusion of everyone else. And many designers did exactly that, mostly because it was easier than supporting multiple browsers.
Competition from the upstart Mozilla Firefox, and later Google’s Chrome, forced Microsoft to finally update their long-stagnant browser. The current version 9 of what Microsoft has quietly renamed Windows Internet Explorer is a very decent browser that has caught up to and is generally comparable to its competitors (although it still lacks a complete tool for viewing and deleting cookies that Firefox and Opera include). But there’s no real reason to use it, except perhaps to access corporate Web sites that stubbornly refuse to allow anything other than Microsoft’s browser. There’s nothing it does that other browsers don’t do better. Internet Explorer (in all its versions) still remains the most widely used browser, although its market share is now less than 50% and continues to decline.
If you’re still using Windows XP, you can’t use the current version 9. And if you have a Macintosh or a Linux box you can’t use Internet Explorer at all.
As I’ve already said, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox is my default browser by default, because of its complete color management. (But it does have problems with profiles that use version 4 of the ICC standard. If your monitor calibration device creates profiles in that format, the color management won’t work.) It has all the other features we’ve come to expect from a modern browser, and it works with just about every Web site out there. There is also a substantial collection of third-party extensions and add-ins, some of which are quite useful.
I still prefer Opera’s adaptable user interface. I particularly miss the ability to set the zoom/magnification for every page, instead of zooming text separately for each page. I also miss the mouse gestures. I still use Opera for Web development, where the lack of color management isn’t a problem. But for everyday Web surfing— with correct colors— I can live with Firefox. I like it better than Windows Internet Explorer, whose user interface I find very annoying.
The Mozilla Foundation seems to be in an intense race with Google to retain the market share it is losing to Chrome. Firefox has adopted Chrome’s minimalist user interface, with all the pull-down menus consolidated into an orange tab (there’s an option to restore the conventional menu bar). More questionable is Mozilla’s adoption of Google’s scheme of frequent releases that receive a new major version number.
There were six of these “major” releases in 2011, most of them minor updates that in the saner past would have at most incremented the number after the first decimal point. Mozilla’s schedule calls for a new release every six weeks. Version 10, the first release of 2012, has a mere handful of insignificant enhancements that most users would not even notice. To placate corporate IT managers who were having conniptions about installing new browsers every six weeks, Firefox 10 is available with a new “Extended Support Release” (ESR) program. Mozilla will provide ESR users with security updates, but they’ll only get new versions every ten months, skipping six of the regular releases.
Possibly to acknowledge the absurdity of incrementing the major version number even for releases with only minor tweaks, Mozilla’s management proposed making version numbers invisible to users. The idea was that they’d push updated “invisibly” to users, who presumably would not care about the version number as long as they always had the latest version. After a chorus of objections from their user community, they quickly withdrew that idea. But it seems to be back in the form of plans for “silent updates” that will automatically install new versions in background. Users won’t even notice that Firefox has been updated unless they specifically check the version number the next time they start it (assuming, of course, that some bug in the new version doesn’t spill the beans first). That feature is expected to be part of version 13, in May 2012.
The one good thing about the “rapid release” race that Mozilla and Google are running is that it encourages innovation and improvement that can benefit users of both browsers. It’s certainly better than the situation in the early 2000s, when Microsoft’s 90+% market share gave them no reason to do anything more than patch their browser in reaction to security failures.
Google’s Chrome is the up-and-coming browser, with a market share that now apparently exceeds that of Firefox. It’s distinguished by a user interface that’s probably about as lean and uncluttered as it’s possible to get. The developers of Firefox seem compelled to copy Chrome’s user interface as well as its rapid update cycle, but I have some difficulty understanding the appeal. Google claims that Chrome is the fastest browser; but I don’t see or feel much speed difference between any of the browsers on my computer. I use it mainly to test revisions to this Web site.
Chrome is supposed to support a limited form of color management. It can’t read profiles in image files, but it can display images (assumed to be sRGB) using a monitor profile if you include the “--enable-monitor-profile” switch option on the command line to start the browser. But I haven’t figured out how to make that work. Including the option (with or without quotes) gives me an error message when Chrome starts. And a search for more information only turns up support forum posts from people frustrated about Google’s apparent lack of interest in supporting color management.
There are some people who are suspicious of Chrome, believing that it surreptitiously tracks browsing and sends the information to Google so they can sell it to advertisers. But apparently what it actually does send to Google is the same as any other browser that offers search “completion” or “suggestion” when typing into a search toolbar.
I haven’t tried Apple’s Safari, which is based on the same “WebKit” core as Chrome. On its native Macintosh OS X, Safari’s integrated user interface is spectacular, especially when used with Apple’s Magic Trackpad. But it does not seem to offer anything compelling for Windows users.
Even though the only officially-sanctioned way to interact with modern computers is by pointing and clicking on hieroglyphic icons, there are many tasks more easily done at an “old fashioned” command prompt. JP Software’s Take Command for Windows (new users, $100, upgrades $50) is a powerful replacement for Microsoft’s CMD.EXE that runs when you open a “Command Prompt.” If you spend any time at all using the “Command Prompt,” Take Command is indispensable. It adds hundreds of powerful commands and enhancements that Microsoft never bothered to add to their command-line interpreters, and replaces a slew of console-mode utilities.
A complete list of added commands would be too lengthy to include here. But a (very) few of them are a text file viewer; a file/text finder; editable command and directory histories; file date/time “touch;” FTP capability to manipulate remote files as if they were local (I use it to manage this Web site); GUI dialog management; T and Y “pipe fittings;” and file descriptions (originally a way around the “8.3” file name limitation of DOS, but still very useful). You can also play audio files, or send e-mail or instant messages from the command line.
Many standard commands are enhanced. For example, you can get a directory of files with today’s date (with file names colored according to their extension); specify a list of files to exclude from copying moving, or deletion; schedule copying, deleting, renaming, or moving “access denied” files for the next reboot; or set the computer’s clock from a time server. You can create aliases for commands or groups of commands, and map them to keys. The current version (13) has optional dialog boxes that offer easy access to powerful command options— a very useful alternative to remembering complex (and often arbitrary) parameters.
Take Command provides enhanced command line editing. You can recall the previous command with the up-arrow key, select command from a list, or use control-0 through control-9 to select an individual parameter of the previous command. Since Take Command is a fully graphical application, it provides a scroll-back buffer from which you can cut and paste text.
Take Command greatly enhances the Microsoft’s batch file capability into a comprehensive and powerful programming language. Control structures include block IF, DO loops, and subroutines. And an extensive set of system information variables and functions manipulate numbers, strings, file names, and even Registry keys. It integrates with REXX, Perl, and Ruby if that’s what you prefer. An integrated development environment, editor, and debugger are built in. And if that’s not enough, Take Command provides a plug-in interface to add your own commands, or download plug-in libraries. Despite all the enhancements, the developers have gone to great lengths to ensure compatibility with all the Microsoft quirks (documented and otherwise) often exploited in batch files.
As a small but useful example of Take command’s extensions, I have a simple alias to show the total size of all files in the current directory and all its sub-directories. When I’m working on a travel photo essay, I create a directory for all the pictures, with separate sub-directories for the 16-bit master files, full-sized JPEG versions, small JPEGs for the Web, camera raw files with their Adobe Camera Raw “sidecars,” and miscellaneous working files. When I’m finished with all the pictures, I archive everything to a set of DVDs. I need to know how large all that data is to determine how it fits on the disks. For that I use DIRSIZE, an alias defined as ECHO %@comma[%@filesize[/s *.*]]. It uses two “variable functions:” @filesize does the actual scanning and totaling— the /s tells it to include all subdirectories— and @comma formats the resulting number with commas. The old-fashioned ECHO command writes the output.
The @comma function actually isn’t necessary here, but it demonstrates how variable functions can be combined. The @filesize function allows optional parameters that format the output number with commas and specifies the units: @filesize[/s *.*,bc]] returns the total size of the directory in bytes, formatted with commas. I could get the result in kilobytes or megabytes rather than bytes with, respectively, @filesize[/s *.*,kc]] or @filesize[/s *.*,mc]].
JP Software previously sold a separate console-mode command interpreter called 4NT. It had the same functionality as Take Command, but could run some text applications faster because it was purely text based without the GUI windowing overhead. I used it to run the combination of batch files (including JP’s extensions) and filters (written in Free Pascal) that creates the index of pictures for this Web site. They also offered TCI, a graphical container that ran console applications in tabbed windows. Beginning with version 9, Take Command combined these functions into a single program that also includes a basic graphical file explorer with directory tree and file view panes. One or more instances of the command interpreter (now renamed TCC) run in tabbed windows within Take Command. Any other console-mode applications can also run in tabbed windows. You can still launch TCC separately as a console application, but there seems little reason to do that. JP Software claims that a console application running in a tabbed window displays text faster than running it directly on the desktop. If you aren’t using the file explorer, you can quickly toggle one or both panes out of the way until you need it. You can also set up a toolbar with buttons to launch your favorite applications.
The integrated “graphical console” approach lets you easily switch between a graphical and a command line interface as you deem appropriate, all within in one application. The integration brings other advantages. You can drag and drop a file from the explorer (or from any other application or the desktop) to the command line window. The name of the file then gets added to the command line, enclosed in quotes if the name has embedded spaces. That’s certainly easier than typing long file names! The file explorer isn’t as powerful as some file managers— I use and recommend Nenad Hrg’s amazing freeware Swiss army knife file manager, Q-Dir.
Now at version 13, and available in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, Take Command is the latest in a line of advanced command interpreters that began in 1989 with 4DOS, a replacement for the primitive COMMAND.COM that was the text-based face of MS-DOS in the days before Windows made computers user-friendly. I started using 4DOS in 1990, on a 12 MHz 286 machine running MS-DOS 3.3. I’ve relied on it and its various descendants ever since. Over the years I’ve seen the command interpreter evolve an impressive array of features. But I suspect it may now have reached its full maturity in terms of truly useful features.
If you don’t need the full functionality of Take Command, there is also a freeware console command interpreter, TCC/LE. It’s a plain console application without the windowed GUI, rather like the old 4DOS or 4NT. It includes most of Take Command’s command-line enhancements, omitting all the Internet access and batch-file debugging capabilities, interfaces to REXX, Perl, and Ruby, and a few advanced functions and variables in the batch-file programming language. Without the mouse and easy cut-and-paste capabilities, TCC/LE is less convenient to use than the full windowed GUI. But for the price there’s no point in complaining.
The demands I make on a text editor are fairly modest. I use it to write this Web site, mostly in HTML with a bit of Perl, Pascal, and Take Command batch language. I use it for personal and recreational programming in those languages. I occasionally need to look at details of my Web site logs. And I use it as a general text editor for notes, off-line e-mail, forum posts, and random thoughts; the main requirement here is that it not get in my way.
Notepad++ (free; Windows only) nicely meets my needs at a price that provides unbeatable value for money. As a general text editor it offers an uncluttered (and customizable) user interface with tabbed multiple documents. It provides all the features you’d want and expect in a text editor: advanced find and replace including regular expressions, multiple documents, and a separate window showing all occurrences in a file; file comparison; word wrapping (based on the width of the window); macros; and spell check.
For programming, it includes syntax highlighting, folding, and bracket matching for over 50 programming and scripting languages (users can add their own; one of these days I’ll make one for Take Command). It’s missing the project management tools that programming teams need, but that’s the focus of recent (as of October 2011) updates.
Don Ho, the Chinese-French author of Notepad++ who has no connection with the late Hawaiian singer, likes to emphasize the editor’s lean and efficient code. By reducing CPU usage, he says he is “trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions.” While I can’t say whether this actually results in a “greener environment,” it is a refreshing exception to the trend toward software bloat.
Consistent with that lean approach, many features are implemented as plug-ins. These include HTML Tidy (an HTML validator), “TextFX” that provides text sorting and a variety of formatting and conversion functions, file compare, a hex editor, the spell checker, ftp, and multiple clipboards. Mr. Ho provides some of them, but others are contributed by users. There’s a fully-documented interface for writing plug-ins in C++, and also an interface— through an oddly-named plug-in called “Pork to Sausage”— for processing text with an external stand-alone program written in whichever language you prefer.
The use of plug-ins creates some quirks and installation difficulties, however. Some of the plug-ins have not been updated for Vista and Windows 7; they write their data and configuration files in their own directory. If you install Notepad++ in the normal C:\Program Files directory, the plug-ins won’t be able to write their files unless you run Notepad++ with administrator privileges. This is a particular problem with the spell checker, which relies on Aspell, an open-source spell checker whose Windows version was last updated in 2002 (newer versions exist for for Linux; and the developers of some Windows programs that use it have built their own custom versions from the source code). These deficiencies can make installing Notepad++ a bit tricky. I have prepared some installation notes, based on my own experience and some posts in various forums, that I hope will smooth the way. Notepad++ is a fine editor at a great price, and it’s well worth working through the small installation hassles.
Before I switched to Notepad++, I used UltraEdit ($50 for new users, $25 annually for upgrades; Windows, Macintosh, and Linux) for nearly a decade. UltraEdit is a widely-used, highly-praised editor that tries to be everything to everybody. And it largely succeeds at doing that. Now in its 17th major version (as of October 2011), it has every feature you can imagine, and more. And it offers preset “environments” for different types of users and tasks, including Web development, technical writing, programming, and system administration. You can configure any of the “environments” to your own preferences. You really can’t go wrong with UltraEdit.
So why did I switch to Notepad++? It’s mostly because I concluded that I didn’t need all those features. Notepad++, which I had been using on another machine, had everything I did need, with a simpler, uncluttered interface. Yes, UltraEdit has a similarly uncluttered “Notepad replacement” preset. But it really doesn’t make sense to use such a full-featured editor for that.
IDM Computer Solutions, the company that sells UltraEdit, operates on an annual subscription model. The $25 annual subscription fee entitles a user to any upgraded versions released during the year. With a product this powerful and mature, an “upgrade treadmill” is probably the only way to realize a continuing revenue stream. The problem is that it inevitably results in bloat, as the company is compelled to keep adding features to a feature-laden product and tweaking the user interface. Obviously, UltraEdit is far from the only software with this problem. And there’s no requirement to upgrade if you find that a “legacy” version continues to meet your needs.
I decided to try version 17.2 when it came out. (My registration code for version 16 would not be valid for it, but UltraEdit is shareware that allows a 30-day trial.) Whenever I upgraded to a major new version of UltraEdit, I always lost the customizations I had made to my toolbars and “environment.” There’s surely an installation option that preserves the customizations, but I always managed to overlook it. This was no exception. After trying the new version, I concluded that the improvements over what I had really weren’t useful enough to justify renewing my subscription. Then I realized that I’d have to redo all my customizations if I reinstalled version 16. When I discovered that I had misplaced my copy of the version 16 installation file, I decided to switch to Notepad++.
There was one other factor in that decision I’m almost hesitant to mention. Ian D. Mead, the founder and president of IDM, is an Evangelical Christian. A page on the IDM Web site explains his faith, and how it guided him to start his company. That said, this page— along with occasional low-key personal notes in the e-mail newsletter IDM sends out— is the only direct expression of Mr. Mead’s faith in connection with UltraEdit. There’s nothing to suggest that the Lord’s direction to him was anything other than “Go forth and make an excellent text editor.”
When I first read Mr. Mead’s “full story” some years ago, my reaction was to marvel at the First Amendment (the provision of the United States constitution meant to guarantee the rights of free expression of religion and free speech). But now, with the increasing politicization of Evangelical Christianity in this country, I had the nagging (though most likely unfounded) suspicion that an UltraEdit subscription might indirectly support things I don’t agree with. That wasn’t a major factor, but it was the proverbial tiny straw that finalized my decision. Conversely, if you do share Mr. Mead’s faith, it may be a reason to choose UltraEdit. But the real reason to choose it is that it’s a great editor at a reasonable price.
Another shareware competitor to UltraEdit worth considering is NoteTab. NoteTab comes in three versions, “Light,” “Standard,” and “Pro.” The “Light” version is freeware, but it is anything but light on features. It’s a great replacement for Microsoft’s crippled Notepad editor, and handles large and multiple files in any available font. The “Standard” version costs $20 and includes a spell checker and thesaurus, better text formatting, and the ability to search and replace text in files on disk. The “Pro” version costs $30, and adds HTML syntax highlighting, faster text replace, bookmarks, outlining, and numerous other features.
It can be difficult to decide between NoteTab Pro and UltraEdit. NoteTab is cheaper and, perhaps, slightly friendlier to use. But I think UltraEdit has enough additional useful features to give it an edge. Try both and decide for yourself. Even if you don’t need a full-featured editor like UltraEdit or NoteTab Pro, it’s well worth downloading the free NoteTab Light.
A “drive image” backup is an exact copy of an entire hard disk or partition on CD, DVD, tape, or some other external media, preferably with compression to save space and writing time. It can be a real life-saver— or at least a system-saver— not if but when a hard drive suffers a catastrophic failure. That has happened to me twice (so far). Just plug in a new hard disk, restore the image from an external hard drive or set of CDs or DVDs, boot the restored disk, and you’re up and running again. A usable backup approach typically requires both a drive image backup and a file-level backup solution. The latter provides ready access to individual files, but it can’t restore a bootable system drive.
Searching for a Backup Solution
I first discovered Terabyte’s Image products in 2003, when I bought a Memorex “True 8x” DVD writer. The drive came bundled with Nero Express OEM, which included an adequate file-level backup feature. But it lacked a drive image capability. Version 2 of NTI’s Backup NOW!, which I had been using for years to make file-level and drive-image backups on a CD writer, didn’t support any DVD writers. So my first thought was an upgrade to the then-current version 3. Its Web site claimed “extensive backup device support” including the “widest range” of DVD writers. In the fine print was a note to check their Web site for a list of supported devices. My DVD drive wasn’t on the list, and their prompt reply to my e-mail query was an apology that they had no plans to support it any time soon. So off to Google I went.
Although the Web site for Symantec’s Drive Image claimed it would work with “virtually any internal or external drive,” my drive wasn’t one of them. And even if it did support my writer, it required Microsoft’ then-new .NET Framework. Putting another reeking pile of Microsoft bloat and security holes on my machine wasn’t particularly appealing. Acronis True Image, PC Magazine’s “Editors’ Choice” for drive backup, could only write DVDs using external UDF packet-writing software— and the one that came with my drive can’t format DVD+R disks. Paragon’s Drive Backup couldn’t burn an image directly to DVD at all under Windows 98. (I later replaced that computer with a new one that ran Windows XP, and replaced DVD backups with a USB external hard drive.)
Having exhausted the realm of commercial shrink-wrap software, I turned to shareware. I found exactly what I was looking for in Terabyte Unlimited Image for Windows. This is a straightforward, no-nonsense tool that can create a bootable CD or DVD with a compressed image of a hard disk partition. At $39, it’s about half the price of its cheapest commercial competitor. Its user interface isn’t fancy or pretty, but all the features are easily accessible. And mirabile dictu, it could write directly to my DVD writer! How could a little shareware company manage what NTI or Symantec— heir to the famous Norton Utilities— can’t? I don’t know. But it works. And it most likely works with any DVD writer (a real advantage of shareware is that you can find out if it really works on your system before you buy it).
The Image for Windows purchase price also includes licenses for Image for DOS and Image for Linux. The Windows package installs PHYLock™, a driver that can lock system files and files in use by applications, allowing the backup of a running system (C:) drive from Windows. That would seem to make the other versions unnecessary for Windows users. But a stand-alone bootable floppy disk (with Image for DOS), or a CD or flash drive (with Image for Linux), is an absolute necessity. It provides the only way to restore a failed hard drive, or a corrupt Windows installation that won’t start. If you’re still running an ancient DOS-based version of Windows (95/98/Me), you’ll need the DOS or Linux version to back up your C drive because PHYLock won’t work.
All three Image versions have the same capabilities, options, and user interface, although the DOS and Linux versions use 1980s-style text rather than Windows graphics. Since they work directly with hardware, they can access just about any IDE or SATA internal hard drive or CD/DVD burner, or a USB or FireWire external drive. They can also read and write NTFS partitions. The Windows package includes a utility that creates a bootable floppy disk containing Image for DOS and TBOS, Terabyte’s DOS clone. The Image for Linux package includes a Windows installer that creates a turnkey bootable CD, DVD, or USB flash drive with a complete Linux installation. You don’t need to be a Unix wizard, since it starts up with a user-friendly menu rather than an intimidating console shell (though a shell is available as one of the menu options). It also identifies hard drive partitions by volume name rather than as opaque Unix “devices.” You’ll need to use Image for Linux rather than the DOS version if your backup media is an external USB drive and you have a USB keyboard. DOS can’t handle both devices simultaneously.
Image offers optional encryption of backup files. It can also optionally omit the Windows paging and hibernation files to save time and space on an image of a system partition. (Those large files contain no useful data, and Windows will just re-create them when you start it from a restored partition.) You can also make a differential backup of only the files that have changed since the last full backup. That should make frequent backups quicker and much more convenient. With either type of backup, Image can optionally verify the integrity of a compressed backup file, or do a byte-by-byte comparison of the backup with the source. Either option increases the time it takes to complete a backup; the byte-by-byte comparison exactly doubles the time. But it can provide an extra measure of assurance for critical backups.
Image for Windows includes two add-on utilities that let you easily extract individual files or directories from a disk image backup file. They effectively make Image for Windows a reasonably convenient file-level backup tool as well as a drive image backup program. TBIView™ is a Windows Explorer extension that lets you navigate and extract individual files from a backup image file. (Image for Linux also includes a command-line version of it.) Double-clicking an image file (with the .TBI extension) opens a navigation window, with the image’s directory tree in the left pane and the contents of a selected directory in the right pane. From there you can drag files or directories to your desktop or to another application. TBIView has saved me from stupid mistakes more times than I’m willing to admit.
The newer TBIMount provides another way to extract files from a disk image backup. It’s a stand-alone program that lets you “mount” an image file as a (read-only) disk drive, with the drive letter of your choice. You can then search, read, and copy files and directories using the Windows explorer, Take Command, or whatever utilities you prefer. Run it again to “dismount” the image file when you’re done. You may need to run TBIMount as an administrator on Vista or Windows 7.
Image in Action
I had been making regular backups with Image for over five years before I had any reason to use its restore capability. My old 160GB Seagate 7200.7 drive didn’t fail, but it was getting uncomfortably close to the end of its warranty. When I found an irresistible price on a 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black drive, I decided that Image would be the ideal tool for copying the old drive to the new one. It can resize a partition after restoring it to a larger drive, and of course I’d also have a complete backup when the upgrade was finished.
My hard drive has a complex setup, with a bootable partition and two data partitions. (I back up the data partitions by copying files directly to an external drive.) Terabyte’s documentation is extensive, but it isn’t entirely clear about how to back up that type of setup and restore it to a new larger drive. I posted a question on Terabyte’s newsgroup (available through an interface on their Web site) and promptly got exact instructions from one of their people. I’ll describe the process, as an example how Image works and some of the options it provides.
Using Image for Linux booted from a USB flash drive, I first backed up the entire old drive onto an external hard drive. Image provides the option of backing up either individual partitions or the entire drive at once; the latter option backs up all partitions. Then I powered down the computer, swapped the drives, and rebooted from the Image for Linux flash drive. As with the backup process, Image can restore the entire drive at once, with the option of resizing the restored partitions to fit a larger drive in proportion to their original sizes; or it can restore (and resize) individual partitions separately.
I restored the C partition first, selecting the options to restore the first track, adjust the Windows BOOT.INI, and make the partition active. Then I entered the new size of the restored partition (39 GB on the old drive, 48 GB on the new drive) in the “resize after restore” text box. Restoring the first track creates a master boot record (MBR) that includes all the old partition letter assignments. It also includes the hidden data some applications (such as Adobe Photoshop) write to the MBR as part of their anti-piracy schemes. Some disk imaging software creates a new MBR when restoring rather than saving and restoring the first track (Image can also do this if you select that option); so any applications that hide data in the MBR will have unexpected problems. The “make active partition” option makes the partition bootable. If you’re like most Windows users and have only one partition on your system drive, the restore process is done after Image restores this partition.
I un-selected the options I listed above when restoring the other two partitions. For each one, I entered the new size for the restored partition in “resize after restore.” That text box displays the minimum partition size for the restore and the maximum available free space on the drive. You can specify any new size within that range. Because I restored the MBR with the C partition, Image correctly created the necessary extended and logical partitions on the disk. It then adjusted their sizes after restoring the data. Note that Image reports free space and specifies partition sizes in Mebibytes, units of 1,048,576 bytes. Manufacturers of disk drives specify capacities in megabytes or gigabytes, units of 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000 bytes respectively. So you’ll have to do some arithmetic when determining the partition size to select in Image.
When Image for Linux finished restoring the third partition, I powered down the computer, disconnected the external drive, and rebooted from the new hard drive. Windows started up flawlessly, although it informed me that it had “found new hardware” (i.e., the new hard disk), which it “installed” and asked me to reboot. I did that, and it again started up flawlessly. Because an image backup restores the sectors of a partition exactly as they appeared on the original drive, the system partition’s volume serial number is the same as it was on the old drive. That helps to avoid triggering Windows’ anti-piracy scheme, which requires “re-activation” if too many hardware items change. I found everything in order, including Photoshop and several other applications that require “activation.”
Commercial products may now have caught up with the DVD writing capabilities of Image. But I can definitely recommend Image for Windows as an excellent and inexpensive drive image backup tool that doubles as an excellent and inexpensive file backup and recovery program. And it’s impressive proof that software can be powerful and useful without unnecessary bloat or fancy bells and whistles. Image for DOS, which fits handily on a floppy disk, proves that the art of writing elegant and compact code is not lost. Microsoft and Adobe could learn much from Terabyte!
Note: I mention copy protection mainly to illustrate the frequent contention that, like so many “security” measures, it tends to cause more difficulty for legitimate users than for the pirates. But I also need to point out the potential legal pitfalls of tools like Terabyte Image. In the United States, Section 117 of the Copyright Act specifically allows backup copies of software that you legitimately own. But any contrary provisions a software publisher buries in its license “agreement” will take precedence. And Section 117 does not apply to other types of copyrighted files, such as music or movies. So making image backups may violate copyright law as well as the license “agreements” for one or more of the software programs on your hard disk.
That said, I believe that the very real benefit of making regular backups specifically to protect yourself from an inevitable disk failure outweighs the theoretical risk of becoming the sacrificial defendant in an overzealous corporation’s test case. (As far as I know, no appellate court has yet ruled on the issue of making this type of disk backup.) Don’t keep backups on networked drives that the RIAA’s or MPAA’s snoops— or actual pirates— might find. Do keep backups on one or more detachable external hard drives in safe locations.
This is all, of course, entirely different from using imaging software to “clone” hard drives for multiple computers without specific authorization or license, or to create images for unauthorized distribution. Anyone who does either fully deserves to be ripped to bloody shreds by a shiver of squaloid attack-lawyers.
About Upgrading Serial ATA Hard Drives
When I did the hard drive upgrade I just described, I had an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard that uses the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset. This chipset— specifically its VT8237 “southbridge”— is one of several older controllers that have a known and documented incompatibility with current SATA 2 hard drives. The motherboard also has a Promise PDC20378 controller (also called “FastTrak 378”), but when I was researching my hard drive upgrade I could find no specific information about its compatibility with SATA2. For the lack of any better place to put it, I’m including this note here to answer that question.
The Promise controller does support SATA 2 correctly. My Caviar Black SATA 2 drive and an older Seagate 7200.9 both work perfectly with the Promise controller in “IDE” mode with no jumpers needed, though almost certainly at 150 megabits per second. I suspect the Promise controller also works with SATA2 drives in RAID mode, but I haven’t tried that. Since my old drive had been running from the Promise controller all along, it had the correct Windows driver installed. But if you are upgrading an older SATA drive that was connected to the VIA controller, you’ll need to first move it to the Promise controller, install the driver, and verify that it works before you make the backup. (By the way, the Promise controller’s SATA capability is only for hard drives. As the Asus motherboard manual clearly notes, it doesn’t support SATA CD or DVD drives.)
If you’re wondering what this all means, current Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives use an interface that is usually (but incorrectly) called “SATA 2” or “SATA II.” It’s an upgrade to the original Serial ATA standard that offers a maximum data throughput of 300 megabits per second, twice the rate of the original standard. (A newer version of SATA can transfer data at 600 megabits per second.) In practice this enhancement is yet another one of those features more useful for marketeers than for users. The old 150-megabit standard is faster than any mechanical disk drive can read or write data. The higher throughput rate could theoretically be beneficial when transferring a small “burst” of data from a hard drive’s cache, or when used with solid-state drives that may one day supplant electromechanical platters.
The developers of the SATA 2 standard included a provision for compatibility with controllers that don’t support the faster rate. When the controller first detects an SATA 2 drive during initial start-up, it “negotiates” a data transfer rate with the drive. If the controller can’t support the faster rate, the drive will configure itself to the older standard. But some first-generation SATA controllers, such as the VT8237, were designed before the SATA2 standard and don’t support the negotiation protocol. They won’t even recognize an SATA 2 drive. To work around that problem, many SATA 2 drives include a jumper option that manually sets the drive to the old standard. But some drives— notably Seagate 7200.11 models larger than 320GB— don’t provide that jumper (all sizes of the newer 7200.12 drives have the jumper). And some others, like my Caviar Black, don’t fully document it. Western Digital’s knowledge base article describes the “OPT1” jumper, but the drive label and the “quick start guide” both state only that the jumper block is “for factory use.”