Regardless of whether its users' desktops, laptops or the server closet, most businesses must grapple with disk drive maintenance, upgrades, replacement, migration, failure, backup, and a host of other tasks and issues. For companies that don't have the IT budget or infrastructure to do deployments and other drive tasks over a network, this means working on each drive or system one by one -- for many of the necessary or helpful IT software tools that means one license for each too.

Future Systems Solutions' Casper Tech Edition hard disk upgrade and disk backup utility is designed for computer technicians, system integrators, and IT department use.

Uses for Casper Tech Edition, like the one-system version, include doing hard drive upgrades for desktop and laptop PCs, managed backups (backups done by an IT person rather than the end user), creating bootable backup disks for use as replacements for a failed or corrupted drive, and simplified drive "cloning" for deployment to new computers, particularly when used in combination with Microsoft's SysPrep utility, allowing direct disk-to-disk cloning.

Future Systems has added new features to version 6.0 of Casper Tech Edition, including:

-- Enhanced support for all versions of Windows 7.

-- SmartClone Plus, a new version of Future System's SmartClone technology, which can work up to 50 times faster than previous versions.

-- Support for Solid State Drives (SSD) and Long Data Sector (LDS) drives, which, according to the company, can increase the life expectancy of these types of drives and enhance their performance

-- USB Boot Capability, "creates a fully bootable copy of a Windows system drive that can boot and run directly from an external USB drive. (Requires a computer with BIOS support for booting from USB hard disk type devices.)"

-- SmartAlert Notifications, emails notifications when a copy is completed.

Casper 6.0 Tech Edition is currently available, MSRP $799.95. (Registered owners of Casper 5.0 Tech Edition can upgrade to Casper 6.0 Tech Edition for $239.95; registered owners who bought their copy of Casper 5.0 Tech Edition after April 30, 2010 can upgrade at no cost.)

Because Casper 6.0 Tech Edition is licensed on a per-user, rather than per-system basis, IT technicians can use it on as many systems and drive as they like, notes Marty Rubenstein, Product Manager, Future Systems Solutions. "This makes it economical for organizations who do not have the budgets for multicasting capabilities, it avoids the expensive multicasting licenses for deployments. It's not just for SMBs, this is also useful for some departments in large enterprises."