Data is the key behind any functioning system. With the use of hard disk drives, a large amount of data can be stored in a disk conveniently. As all data can be stored in a single HDD, the possibility of disk failure poses a new threat to the availability of data. A disk may fail due to various reasons. Mechanical failure is common in old disks. Other reasons include natural catastrophe like earthquakes, floods, etc. When sensitive information is stored in HDD, it becomes essential to reduce the possibility of data loss. This is achieved by storing the data redundantly. The process of duplicating the contents of a data storage device to another device is called disk imaging.
What is disk imaging?
It refers to the exact duplicate of the HDD which contains sensitive information. All information present in the HDD are copied to a new storage medium. A clone of the HDD is created and the data can be easily recovered from the duplicate. The only possibility to recover from data loss is creating redundancy and imaging software helps the administrator to clone HDD containing valuable information. Diabetic Eye screenings
How disk imaging software works?
The imaging software creates a clone using the image of the disk. The software does not create a backup with the exact information present in HDD. If this has to be done by the software, then to create a backup of a 80GB hard drive, another 80GB hard drive would be needed. This is not a feasible option. Imaging does not deploy data mirroring technique. The software will create an image of the disk which is much smaller in size. This image can be then used to retrieve the data using data retrieval software.
Benefits of disk imaging
Imaging is prominently used to create a back up for sensitive data. With the use of appropriate software, it is easy to create a disk image. If the normal HDD fails, data can be recovered from the image in simple steps. You can create an image of a single partition or the whole drive. It is possible to store the image of your operating system. Later, you can install this image at once if your operating system crashes.
The administrators prefer to keep the same configuration in all the computers in a network. To facilitate this without the use of disk imaging, you need to install the operating system, device drivers and other software in every single computer. In this scenario, you can take advantage of imaging to reduce the laborious work. Install all the required software including operating system in a single computer. Use a imaging software and create an image of this configured computer. In a single step, install this image in all the computers in the network to configure all the computers in the same way.