It is a scary thought but your hard drive could stop functioning at any moment. Will you be ready? If you’ve got a drive image, you’ll save not only your data but your apps, drivers, and all the settings that make your machine personal.
You may never have experienced a drive failure or become so corrupted that your data was beyond retrieval, but that doesn’t mean you never will. And think of this: If your system ever fails in a hardware or software disaster, will you really have time to reinstall Windows and all your applications and tweak all your OS and application settings? I’m guessing the answer is no. I certainly don’t. This is why you need a drive-imaging program that backs up your complete system—including all your data and applications—and can restore it all in minutes.
Traditional backup programs (we’ll be looking at those in the near future) back up your documents, photos, music, and spreadsheets. Drive-imaging programs do much more. They do back up your data, of course, but they also back up your applications, your whole Windows system, and all the low-level drivers and software that you normally never notice but without which Windows can’t manage. An ordinary backup program copies your files. A drive-imaging program makes a byte-by-byte duplicate of your full hard drive (or of one or more partitions if you’ve divided your physical drive into multiple logical drives), maintaining the identical data structure.
Hence, if your drive fails, you can pop in a new drive and restore your system to exactly the state it was in when you made the drive image. For that matter, if your system becomes unstable because you installed software that won’t uninstall cleanly, you simply write over the drive (or partition) with the stable system you were using a few days ago. You’ve probably noticed that Windows’ System Restore often doesn’t restore your system because it doesn’t image your drive. Instead, it performs fancy tricks with the Windows Registry and other Windows files—tricks that work on a clean, simple system but are too complicated to perform reliably on a heavily used real-world system. Drive-imaging software, by contrast, always restores your system.
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