I briefly tried the ImgBurn free image burning software a few months ago, but ended up going back to my purchased copy of Nero Burning Rom just because I was more used to it I suppose. I have way too many applications installed and in most cases try to just keep it to one particular program installed for each particular function when possible. *Update - This software now contains spyware in it's installation files which cannot be turned off. This is in the latest version 2.5.1.0. Previous versions don't seem to have included the spyware.

It wasn't until today when I found out how useful ImgBurn was. I am the computer genius of the family, and heard that my sister's laptop was acting up, so I offered to take a look at it. After realizing that I wasn't sure if she had a virus or not, I wanted to avoid copying her files directly to any of my external hard drives.

She doesn't have any burning software on her laptop, but it has a DVD Burner in it, so I figured I could back up the data that way. Perhaps she never realized that, or just never got the software to burn anything, but you can store quite a bit of information on a single DVD. I remembered that ImgBurn was a free image burning application so I downloaded the latest version, a lightweight 2,119 KB.

After the quick install, I made a new image file in the .iso format out of the folder of images that she had on her computer. She had over 3 GB of photos in the folder, so it fit well within the DVD5 single density DVD format. I know, this isn't doing anything about protecting her new installation from getting infected if there is a virus hiding, but it is backing up her data quickly and effectively. Creating the .iso file took about 5 or 10 minutes and ran at about 3.5x average speed while building the iso. That's not bad I guess for packaging thousands of files into an image to burn.

Burning the image was much faster and both processes had a nice audible sound to let me know they were completed. Overall the process was quicker and easier than I thought, so I would definitely recommend ImgBurn to anyone stuck in a pinch, or don't want to fork up the money for a commercial burning application like Nero Burning Rom. Using ImgBurn was a safe alternative to copying all of her files onto my external hard drive and possibly infecting my files. A very easy way to pick up a virus is to connect an external storage device to an infected computer and then to an uninfected computer. Today's viruses will most likely infect any computer that the now infected device gets plugged in to.

I saved the rest of her data onto a Dropbox drive that I created for her. I figure at this point, data stored within "the cloud" is safer and more secure from most viruses mainly because those servers are going to be monitored for those types of things regularly. You can save up to 2 GB of data for FREE on a Dropbox of your own. Get a Free Dropbox here. Read more about the features of Dropbox in our Dropbox review.