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How to create, manage and copy your hard drive image!

Hard Drive Imaging
Cloning of hard drive images is a process of creating an exact copy from a computer's hard drive. The hard drive imaging software captures a snapshot of the System State so that it is possible to restore the system back at a later time to the original state the system was in when the disk or partition image was made. The cloned copy includes all the operating system installation, application software, boot sectors, partition information, and file allocation table.

The hard drive image utility is a practical system recovery tool in case you get a hard drive disaster. Let say you are experience a fatal system failure, then you will be able to easily rebuild the drive partition from the stored image file to a known, working state or merely restore the lost or corrupted files and folders back from the image.

System integrators and administrators are using hard disk image programs primarily for large-scale Windows, Mac or Linux systems deployment having the identical configuration and application software.

Imagine that you have to setup a lab with say 30 new identical PCs running the same applications. A normal approach would be to individually install the operating system and the required applications onto each and every machine. This methodology is repetitive, boring, prone to human error and would typically take many hours if not days to complete.

A much better method instead is to do the following:

  1. Make an operating system and applications installation on one. On completion, double check the installation.
  2. When you have confirmed that the PC is working, make a clone of that disk partition.
  3. Now simply copy the partition to each of the remaining 29 systems.

Create a backup Vs a disk drive Image
Traditional backup software work by copying files, one by one on to a secondary offline data media on another disk, tape or DVD. The reason for taking backup is actually to store data and the work made by the end user. In contrast, the basic reason for using a disk cloning utility is more to do with preservation of the system configuration and the installed application rather than for the recovery of user data. In reality all end user data gets overwritten when a Clone is re-written.

Things to keep in mind while using hard disk image software
The key point with disk imaging is that it is effective only when all of your PC hardware is exactly the same. This is because the image file contains the exact driver information of the hardware for all the machines that were installed at the time of cloning.

Another issue is that unlike traditional backup software, hard drive imaging utilities do not offer fine control on what to backup. You can either select the entire system drive or you can specify a specific drive partitions that you want save as a disk image


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