Episode #86
Using Image Files

Hi Leo: I watch your program often and I learn something new during every show. My question is about backing up my entire harddrive in an image file. I know that you have mentioned it on the show but I am trying to find out specifically how it works. I want to be able to back my system up and then be able to restore it again. This is very useful if you reformat your computer or it crashes to recover everything quickly. I would like to know how the image file works, do you need software and what do you need? How do you store the image file? Do you save the image file to a DVD or CD and how many CDs or DVDs are used? How is the image file restored? Thank you in advance for you time and I look forward to hearing back from you.

Lynn, Kitimat, BC



The method of recovery will depend on the software you use to create the image. If you use something like Norton Ghost to create an image of your entire drive, you’ll need to boot from a Norton Ghost CD or floppy, and use it to recover your computer from the saved image. On the other hand, if you’re using a fully-bootable image created by a program like the Mac’s SuperDuper!, it may be as simple as swapping to the backup drive or booting from it instead of your main drive.

Personally, I think you should use a second hard drive for an image of your entire hard drive—it’s fast, large and relatively cheap. (I hate messing around with a whole series of spanned DVDs, any one of which could be damaged, rendering the entire disk image useless.) But if you’re going to use another drive, you may want to disconnect it from the machine between backups, and place it in a safe location, so that a virus doesn’t munch both your computer and your backup at the same time.

www.drivesnapshot.de

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