Hard Disk Image Software

Disk image is a complete copy of all hard drive data, which is made on a physical level. Disk images are created through a fundamentally different approach, than file copies, and allow backing up data that can't be accessed with common methods. Particularly, disk image includes HDD boot records, partition table, system files, etc.

There is a direct difference between file backup software and disk imaging software. File backup uses standard drivers of the operating system, it doesn’t expect the user to have advanced computing skills and can be done manually. Creation of a disk image, technologically, is much more complicated process that can't be made "by hand". It is less flexible (it allows backing up, at minimum, HDD partitions as a whole), yet it can be used for complete PC backup which will include operating system and all control data.

The advantage of disk imaging is that it gives no regard to the file system. Different operating systems use different technologies for accessing and managing HDD files: for example, NTFS file system used by Windows is completely different from Ext2 used by Linux. Therefore, if you want to backup files, then you strongly depend on the system you work under. Yet if you want to create a disk image backup, it's not important at all, because any disk imaging utility can be used to back up any HDD partition, independently of the file system it is formatted as.

If you want to create disk images for system backup purposes, it is important to remember that backups provide data retention only when they are made systematically and regularly. This means that the software must provide all necessary scheduling and storage options, logging and notification mechanisms (to control results), etc. We recommend downloading and trying a solution that we develop: Handy Backup.