Can i image my hard drive

Imaging your hard drive goes beyond simply backing up files by also including your Windows installation, system configuration, drivers and installed programs. This kind of backup saves your business considerable time when facing a critical system error or hard drive failure.

You cannot restore to a smaller partition size than the original. Macrium Reflect Free is another popular free utility for disk imaging or disk cloning. The layout is also easier to navigate and understand. You can clone a disk or image a disk. Cloning is better if you want to move everything on one disk to another hard disk, i. Imaging a disk can be scheduled whereas cloning has to be done manually. You can then restore the images to the same hard drive, a replacement hard drive or even to a new computer, though the last option will require a paid version of Macrium to restore to the new hardware.

The restore process is fairly straightforward and if you get confused anywhere, they have tutorials for creating images, restoring images, troubleshooting problems, etc. EaseUS creates a lot of different products and one of the best is Todo Backup. Again, like Paragon, they want to upsell you to their paid versions, but the free version worked just fine for me when performing a backup and restore.

Using the free version, you can only recover to the same disk or a new disk on the same machine. This option usually gets you up and running with a new drive within a couple of hours. But there are issues while trying to image a failing hard drive. And imaging takes time, so cloning a drive often makes the most sense. This is where imaging shines. Cloning is great for fast recovery, but imaging gives you a lot more backup options.

Taking an incremental backup snapshot gives you the option to save multiple images without taking up a lot more space. This can be helpful if you download a virus and need to roll back to an earlier disk image.

Cloning only gives you one copy per drive. As disk cloning duplicates your entire hard drive, you can restore your system to its initial state in much less time. Using IDrive's disk clone, you can backup a system with hard disk or an entire drive, with the content exactly as it is on the original storage device, including both data and structure information.

The image file can be backed up to the cloud or locally on any external hard drive.