Reader Question Answered: Good Software For Making Disk Images

Thanks to the warm welcome from my introductory column. Now we're getting down to business and answering a reader question. Ninan wrote "I have a question about Disk Imaging Software. Can you recommend a software?" Before I get down to recommending specific software, let's talk about what a disk image is and why you might want one in the first place.

Simply put, a disk image is a copy of everything on your computer's hard drive, this is more than a back up it's an exact copy so that you could restore your computer's hard drive back to that point in time. Is it better than a "regular" backup? It's more that it's different, than better. Let's say you are updating your computer from Windows XP to Windows 7 (I'd just switch to Mac myself, oh right I already did that), you might make a disk image of your machine just before the upgrade so that if your upgrade goes badly, you can quickly go back to where you were before.

This sounds great, but there is a catch: size. Since a disk image is an exact copy of your drive, if you have 150 gigabytes of data on your drive, your disk image is going to be the same size. That's more than a DVD can hold (4.7 GB, by the way), so making a disk image means that you need at least that amount of space available on some other hard drive to make the image. That's not terribly hard, an external hard drive big enough to hold all your data isn't very expensive at all, but the other side is the time you need to get it done.

When I made an clone of this machine's drive for my pre-Snow Leopard update it took hours. In the end I didn't need it, but I was glad I had it. Do I make an image of my drive very often? Nope. There are much easier (and smaller) ways to have a backup. Still sometimes you just need to make a disk image, and here are my suggestions for disk image apps:

• Windows:
  • Windows 7 has a disk image tool built in (that's convenient)
  • Acronis True Image won kudos from PC users in my Twitter crowd ($$)
  • Clonezilla is a free, open-source app. The screen shots don't thrill me from a UI perspective so I'm thinking experienced folks only
  • DriveImage XML () another freebie. The UI looks better so I think novice users could work through this okay.
• Mac:
  • Disk Utility is the built in tool. I've used this to both make disk images and turn disk images into something useful (e.g. A drive)
  • SuperDuper is a free and pay app. This is the tool I used in my pre-Snow Leopard backup
  • CarbonCopyCloner This free app is the must have in most Mac user's tool kit.

Remember making a disk image isn't hard but you're going to need something nearly as large as your disk to make it. While it does make for a good backup, there are much more efficient ways to go about it.

For my tip of the week. Check out VersionTracker.com for all the updates to you favourite apps (Mac and PC). This has been my go to site for … probably more than 12 years.

Remember you can email your questions to tris@techplanations.com.