How do disk images work

You then spent a few hours reinstalling all of your applications such as Office , Google Chrome, and Adobe Creative Suite. One person tells you to clone your primary hard drive. But another tells you to take an image. And both do achieve the same goal. Both cloning and imaging create an exact record of your drive. That includes all the files on the drives along with the master boot record and everything else your PC needs to boot in Windows.

So how do they differ? Disk Imaging: Imaging creates a large compressed file of your drive. Disk cloning and disk imaging are two processes that accomplish the same goal: They copy all of a hard drive's contents.

It's possible to clone a disk by using a disk image, but the two are distinctly different in the process they use to copy hard drives. Disk cloning creates a functional one-to-one copy of a hard drive, while disk imaging creates an archive of a hard drive that can be used to make a one-to-one copy.

Disk images and disk clones are different than just copying and pasting the entire contents of one hard drive to another. When you copy and paste files from one drive to another you're copying only the the actual files and not the additional data the hard drive uses to locate and access those files.

Things like the master boot record and the file allocation table are not copied to the new hard drive when you copy and paste. A copy and paste backup drive won't boot. Since disk images contain raw disk data, it is possible to create an image of a disk even if it is written in an unknown format or with an uncommon operating system. Disk images are extremely useful when backing up mission-critical systems, since the resulting image will retain the OS, files, settings, and various other data.

We create disk images or clones of every functional hard drive that we recover, and in some cases, we work from mounted virtual disks instead of working directly with the original media.

Logical disk images are especially helpful during RAID recovery. Encrypt your files fast and efficiently with the help of this fantastic software utility. Try it now for free! Free trial Get it now What is disk image file and how does it work? A disk image is a type of file that is an exact copy of a certain disk. For example, a disk image is usually a copy of a certain optical media, but you can also create a disk image from your hard drive or from a USB flash drive.

We have to mention that the disk image is a perfect copy of a certain optical media, therefore it will have all of its properties. Disk images have a long history, and they were used way back in the s for backup and disk cloning. Back then users used them to clone mainframe disk media to magnetic tape.

Over the years disk images became more popular, and they gained massive popularity during the era of floppy disks. Many people tend to use disk images simply because they are easy to use and because they provide extra convenience. One of the main reasons why people use disk images is to prevent their optical discs from wearing out. If you want to use certain optical media you have to find it, open its case, open your disk drive, and insert your media.

With disk images, there are no such problems, and all that you have to do is to find an image file, click it, and it will become available to access, just as if you inserted a real disc in the optical drive. Besides convenience, we have to mention that you can read an image file faster than an optical disc since hard drives have a fast reading speed.