Hard disk Image

A hard disk image is a complete backup of the contents and structure of a given hard drive. A hard disk image is sort of a “clone” of the original hard drive at a the time the image was taken. A hard disk image is probably the most useful form of backup to recover from computer system failure. Built in features of Windows XP like system restore cannot help you recover from every type of computer failure that a disk image can.

Having a hard disk image (preferably a recent one) can make fixing computer problems almost effortless. Normally, if you encounter system problems you would spend some time to try to diagnose and fix the problem. You could easily spend quite a bit of time diagnosing the problem and never really solve the problem thus being forced to reinstall Windows and all you programs over again (takes lots of time). However, if you had a recent hard disk image, you could simply restore you computer to the exact state (to the last byte) it was in when the image was taken. You don’t even have to know what caused the problem (virus, driver conflict, …) or how to fix it, you simply click restore in your drive imaging software.

Acronis True Image is an excellent commercial software for drive imaging. Other commercial drive imaging software include Norton Ghost 12 (I have tried it and was not as happy with it as with Acronis), Drive Backup 8.5, and many others. DriveImage XML and SelfImage are free hard drive imaging software that can make an image while Windows is running. These freeware utilities are certainly better than nothing however, they cannot perform incremental or differential backups. Seagate DiscWizard is a free scaled down version of Acronis True Image. Seagate DiscWizard cannot perform incremental backups either. Seagate DiskWizard resembles Acronis True Image Home 10.

Download a 15 day free trial of Acronis True Image Home 11.

Tutorial Videos:

1. Tutorial on using Acronis True Image 11 to create an image of your computer system.
2. Tutorial on scheduling Acronis True Image Home 11 to make incremental backups weekly
3. Tutorial on using Acronis True Image 10 to create an image of your computer system.
4. Tutorial on scheduling Acronis True Image Home 10 to make incremental backups weekly