How to Create a Hard Drive Image

There are many preferences and settings that are set up on your hard drive. Often these are set up initially when you purchase your computer. Throughout the time period that you have been using your computer, you have most likely added a great deal of data and even a number of preferences and settings to your hard drive.

If your system crashes or you have any kind of issue that creates a loss of the information on your computer, setting it all back up from scratch can be a time-consuming problem. It may also be impossible to retrieve all of your data that was lost. If you are not comfortable with doing this yourself for any reason, it will also be an added expense for you to hire someone to take care of this for you.

In order to prevent the loss of the data and settings on your computer, you need to have some sort of a backup plan to recover all of this old data. Creating a hard drive image is one way to do save you the time, expense and possibly even heartache that may come with a computer crash.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Imaging software

1. Research the various types of software available to create an image of your hard drive. Acquiring good imaging software will save you time and money in the long run.

2. Make sure that you always have an updated image of your hard drive to restore by using the RAID method. RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. This involves installing a second hard drive that is constantly updated so that if you lose the data on one hard drive you can seamlessly switch to using the second. You can also copy the good hard drive back over to the one that was lost and quickly have both working well again.

3. Back your hard drive data up yourself if you don't want to purchase imaging software. Back-up your software program folders, your registry files, all your important data and folders and system folders. This is a time consuming manual process. One way to do this is to go to the start menu and through the programs and accessories menus you will find a back-up option.

4. Store your back-up image of your hard drive on an external hard drive, a zip drive or a DVD-R.

5. Perform your back-ups monthly if you have chosen to copy everything manually or if you are using an imaging software that does not include the RAID method. When you have to re-image your hard drive everything will come back exactly as it was at the moment of your last back up. Everything that you did after your last back up will be lost.

Tips & Warnings

• If you use your computer daily you will want to back-up your hard drive more frequently. Imaging software can be purchased on-line or any any computer services retailer.
• Don't neglect your research when you are choosing the imaging software that will best suit your needs. If you create an image of your hard drive today and your hard drive crashes next year, everything that you have done over those 12 months could be lost.