Whoever makes regular backups of a hard disk will sleep better at night. An "image" is an especially convenient way of doing this – and offers many advantages.
(By Jörg Schieb) None of us enjoy thinking about worst case scenarios – it’s not in our nature. This is probably why we rarely consider what can happen to the valuable data we have entrusted to our PC. On the contrary: we get a big kick out of using larger and larger hard disks upon which we can save ever increasing amounts of data. Texts, figures, photos, videos, appointments, E-mails – and a lot of this data is extremely important, and often wholly irreplaceable.
And yet it can happen in the blink of an eye: somewhere within the PCs engine there’s a quiet “click”, the hard disk has given up the ghost, and all the vital data on it has gone down the drain. Or the Notebook crashes suddenly. Or you click the wrong button in error, and all important data disappears.
In short: a lot can happen. And, rest assured, sooner or later it will! I myself have lost important data. The first time it happened I was hopping mad, the second time I began to curse – only after it happened for a third time did I finally began to think about a sensible backup concept.
Everyone should do the following: ask yourself, which data are really important to me and which do I need to backup regularly? Happily,0making backups is no longer any big deal. Some time ago, backups involved using floppy disks, CDs or tapes. Nowadays you can burn DVDs or connect external hard disks and start the backup with just a push of the button.
While we’re on the subject: in my opinion, the best way to do a backup is by creating an image. An image is understood to be a 1:1 copy of any hard disk or drive. An image is not just a copy of the actual data but also of everything else, even the administration sectors of the storage volume. One big advantage: if something ever gets lost or damaged, the hard disk can be totally restored with hardly any bother.
Since an image also saves the operating system along with all the programs installed on it, if there’s ever a crash there’ll be no need to install any new software (which takes up an unbelievable amount of time and can be really annoying). Restoring the image onto a, possibly different, hard disk is all it takes – in no time at all you can start working again.
O&O DiskImage lets you do this in an especially convenient way. The program is able to create images automatically and independently. The first image will include the entire hard disk while the next ones will be “incremental” images, meaning; only the changes made to this first image will be saved – which can be done much faster. For myself as a user, this allows me to always go back to any current 1:1 image of my hard disk without having to copy all of it every time. And since O&O DiskImage comes with a Start CD, if worse comes to worse, all I have to do is insert the CD in the computer and once it’s started, the image will easily let me restore the hard disk back to the condition it had at the time of the last imaging.
If someone is unable to use an external hard disk or prefers not to, he can also burn the image onto a CD or DVD The data can also be encrypted (which is highly recommended for ensuring that nothing can be done with it should the copy ever fall into the wrong hands) or compressed, so that it takes up much less space.
In addition, I’d like to clear up an old preconception: whoever creates an image does not have to restore everything on it. If anyone needs to or wants to reconstruct only individual files or folders, this can also be done without any problem. O&O DiskImage allows you to access the image over the Windows Explorer. In this way, every individual file or folder can be approached – and if needed, be easily recovered.
In short: I’m totally convinced that images are the ideal and, above all, most convenient way of making backups.
About Jörg Schieb:
Jörg Schieb has been working since 1986 as a free-lance technical journalist for television, radio, and a number of renown magazines. He is familiar to many viewers as the author and anchorman of the popular program “Angeklickt” (“Clicked On”) which is nationally broadcast on German television. He is also the celebrated author of over 100 books on the most varied subjects concerning computers and programming.
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