Image Hard Drive Clean Clone HDD Disk

Image Hard  Drive

As a security measure, it is wise to image hard drive so when something is messed up or needing to replace a hard drive, everything in the computer can be restored back to a pristine clean condition without having to reformat and reinstall the operating system and associated programs. In fact, hard drive image is one of the most convenient backup approaches.

To image hard drive, you would need at least two hard disks or one hard disk and one other type of writable media installed in the same system. Considering hard drive prices are getting so low, we strongly suggest to image hard drive using two physical hard disks.

A hard disk imaging software will be required to image hard drive. Some disk imaging utilities omit unused file space from source media, or compress the disk they represent to reduce storage requirements, though these are typically referred to as archive files, as they are not literally disk images. There are many free hard drive imaging software available in the market, such as DriveImage XML, Runtimes Shadow Copy and Easy Use Disk Copy etc. Different image hard drive utilities have different imaging functions. You may want to read through utility descriptions before executing the imaging process.

Disk cloning is a category of utility software that copies the contents of one computer hard disk drive to another or into an image file. This "clone disk"  is sometimes referred to as ghost Imaging. Often, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image. This "clone disk" procedure is also very useful when moving to a clean larger capacity disk.

There are a number of notable uses for "clone disk" "clone HDD" software, including:

Reboot and restore - a clone HDD  technique in which the disk of a computer is automatically wiped and restored from a "clean", master image that is in full working order without viruses.

Provisioning new computers - "clone disk" utilities can be used to provision a standard set of software so that a new user is ready to go straight away with a complete clean hard drive loaded application suite and does not have to waste time installing individual applications.

Hard drive replace or upgrade. An individual user may use "clone disk" utility to replace or to upgrade to a new clean and typically larger hard disk drive.

Full system backup.  The "clone disk" utilities can be used to create a rather comprehensive backup of the operating system and other installed software.

System recovery. The "clone disk" technique can be used to restore a computer to its clean and original factory software configuration.

Transfer to a different user. A system sold or given to another person may be reset by reloading a known clean "cloned image" that contains no personal files or information.