Disk Imaging Software for Backups

One day, your hardrive will fail tak­ing all your data with it — disk ima­ging soft­ware is the fast­est way to recov­ery from this.

Disk ima­ging soft­ware does what backup soft­ware can’t. It can only be run from a boot­able CD or DVD whilst Win­dows isn’t run­ning, dur­ing which time it makes a copy of your entire C drive con­tents includ­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem (which are locked and can’t be copied whilst Microsoft Win­dows is act­ive). It cre­ates an exact copy of your hard drive con­tents, so if the disk fails alto­gether you install an identical (or pos­sibly just the same man­u­fac­turer) drive and copy the image back to the new hard disk — and it works again! Yay!

Sounds a lot easier than installing Win­dows and all your soft­ware all over again doesn’t it?

Disk Ima­ging Soft­ware (or clon­ing as it is some­times called) isn’t a method most home PC own­ers think of when plan­ning to backup their PC. For com­pany IT depart­ments who main­tain dozens, if not hun­dreds or thou­sands of identical PCs, ima­ging is often the norm for PC rebuilds or repairs.

But it’s also use­ful to home users because it makes the pro­cess of back up and restor­ing pro­gram and sys­tem files very easy.

How Disk Ima­ging Soft­ware Works

In a nut­shell, disk ima­ging soft­ware takes a snap shot of your drives con­tents as they are. It com­bines everything it sees — every pro­gram, set­tings file, driver for every hard­ware com­pon­ent — on the drive into a single very big file, called an image or clone.

So if you need to replace your hard disk, or rebuild your PC because of per­form­ance issues, or sys­tem crashes caused by cor­rupt files or a virus, you run the ima­ging soft­ware and trans­fer your cloned image file back to the hardrive and you should be good to go.

This clone file can­not be updated, so image backups need to be taken reg­u­larly as your C drives con­tents change.

If you include doc­u­ments and pic­tures that change fre­quently, this can get cum­ber­some — If you take a back up like this, you need to take a full drive backup each time, and this to me is the weak point of ima­ging soft­ware. You need backup soft­ware that per­forms dif­fer­en­tial or incre­mental backups — see this page for info on file backup soft­ware.

When to Use Disk Ima­ging Software

How you use it depends which ver­sion you have — see below for the most com­mon ones. If you get a new hard disk or want to rein­stall Win­dows and other soft­ware from scratch think, once everything is installed and you’ve tweaked everything just how you want it — this is the time to take an image of you C drive. Defrag the hardrive and take the image before you do any­thing further.

You might never need to do it again, except if you install any­thing major like upgrad­ing Microsoft Office to a newer ver­sion or some dis­aster occurs, like if the registry becomes fubar.

Which is the Best Disk Ima­ging Software?

Guess, what? That really depends how you define best!

Acronis True Image 2012 Backup Software

Microsoft Win­dows 7 has an ima­ging com­pon­ent built into it’s backup and restore cen­ter — the best part about that is that it’s free! So if free appeals, you need not look fur­ther, the only extra gad­get you need is an external hard disk drive or a sec­ond­ary internal hardrive.

Which leads to the next pos­sib­il­ity. Seag­ate, Max­tor and West­ern Digital hard drives cur­rently ship with cut down ver­sions of Acronis Trueim­age or Dis­cW­iz­ard. You can use this disk ima­ging soft­ware to clone the entire con­tents of a drive, but not for the incre­mental or dif­fer­en­tial backups that are bet­ter for dynamic data. It does one thing very well.

External hardrives may well ship with hybrid backup soft­ware that can take an image of your hard drive and per­form sched­uled backups of other data files. It takes a full drive backup as an image, plus reg­u­lar backups of any files that change over time. This to me is the ideal solu­tion — all bases are covered in the most effi­cient way.

A great example is the Toshiba Can­vio range which has NTI backup Now EZ pre­in­stalled that uses full image and file backups together in this way.

Another well known ima­ging soft­ware brand often used in pro­fes­sional IT depart­ments is Acronis True Image, it’s full fea­tured and well worth a look — here is one of the more bal­anced reviews of it.

Con­clu­sion

Disk ima­ging soft­ware is per­fect as a means of back­ing up the oper­at­ing sys­tem and all your soft­ware, if you use it prop­erly! Prefer­ably test the image before you redeploy it. If you do this, re-imaging a new hard drive takes minutes.

But back­ing up your entire C drive con­tents in this man­ner takes hours and to be sure needs to be done reg­u­larly — monthly, if not weekly. Ideally I would use Win­dows 7 backup and restore centre or Acronis True Image 2012 which takes images and also auto­matic incre­mental backups of your per­sonal data.

Search Amazon.com for disk ima­ging soft­ware and backup hardware

• Acronis Ture Image
• Toshiba Can­vio
• Seag­ate internal hard drives
• West­ern Digital hard drives
• Max­tor hard drives
• Win­dows 7

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Pop­u­lar Related Pages

• Choos­ing external hardrives
• More on set­ting up backups
• Using online backups ser­vices for higher security
• Return to the PC backup Soft­ware mainpage
• Return from Disk Ima­ging Soft­ware to the PC Repair Soft­ware homepage

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