Disk Image

Disk image is a complete snapshot of a hard disk which is created by disk imaging software without querying the file system. Hard drive is a sector-addressable device, and HDD imaging is made through sector-based copying: this is the most complete approach to PC backup, as it allows backing up system with all drivers, applications and their settings, documents, music and other information.

Since hard drive data is very much disordered, disk imaging can't be used for "targeted" backup of specific files and folders. Even if you somehow determine particular sectors that correspond to these or that files in the file system, their backup may appear practically useless, because operating system constantly tries to optimize physical location of files on the drive (to provide applications with faster access to them), and by the time you need to restore the information, the sectors from which it was retrieved may be already occupied by different files. That's why in the practice, disk images are created as a whole, and the minimal amount of data that can be backed up is an HDD partition.

Disk Image Backup Software

Handy Backup is a powerful backup software, in which we've taken great efforts to make disk imaging as easy as possible, even for users with basic IT knowledge. A convenient Task Wizard will guide you through all task creation steps. All you need to create an image backup is a secondary hard drive or some network storage (e.g. if you want to transfer backup to FTP server) to place backup to.

Though disk imaging is usually considered more as run-once backup procedure, Handy Backup also allows performing it automatically, on a scheduled basis. Disk image can be added to backup set similarly to how file backup tasks are created – and can be supplemented with a variety of related options, such as compression, verification and other. See the full list of Handy Backup features...

To learn more about creating image backups with Handy Backup, please see Image Backup in the User Manual.

Handy Backup – reliable disk imaging software for Windows computers!