Have you come across a system crash or even a disk crash? It’s annoying to lose important data because of these failures. Take it easy, this post from MiniTool lists the top 5 powerful disk imaging software that enables you to back the system, files, and even the whole disk with ease.
What Is Disk Imaging Software
Disk imaging software is a kind of backup software that is professional in copying the contents of a data storage device and then putting them to another similar device (local drive, external hard drive, CD/DVD, network) with the compressed file format. These original contents can be systems, programs, setups, and personal files. Disk imaging software is most commonly used in case of system crashes or even disk crash where data recovery is urgent.
A good disk imaging software should be the one that not only makes the process easy, but lets you choose which file/folder/partition/disk you want to clone or mount, schedule a backup, and make encryption. Besides, some welcomed imaging software even allows customizing command line scripts, letting you have great control over your data.
Why You Need an Imaging Software
Today disk imaging software is widely used by people from different occupations. To sum up, the reasons can be the following:
- Natural disasters, power outages, and improper operations happen without a warning, which may lead to system failure or hard drives empty. By making an image of your computer’s hard drive, you won’t be troubled by reformatting and reinstalling the operating system, since imaging software offers you the ability to restore an image to your hard drive within a short time.
- With professional disk imaging software, you’ll have the flexibility to schedule your backup task. In this way, you avoid repeating backup and can enjoy playing on your computer without worry.
- Some disk imaging software offers a Universal Restore feature, which is a time-saving choice when you are faced with dozens of computers – even with dissimilar hardware – to be installed in a limited time.
Top 5 Disk Imaging Software You Can Get
Since disk imagining is important and useful, here we recommend 5 disk imaging software to help you back up.
Top 1. MiniTool ShadowMaker
MiniTool ShadowMaker, a brand new disk imaging solution put forwarded by MiniTool Software Ltd., is designed to deal with all kinds of imaging issues such as system imaging and disk imaging. Although it is a new emergency, it does offer rich features like incremental/differential backup, scheduled backup, backup encryption, etc.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 1. After installing this disk imaging software, click Keep Trial to continue.
Step 2. Click the Backup tab, and it requires you to select the source content and the destination location.
Note: It is recommended to back up to another hard drive such as an external hard drive. Do not put all eggs in one basket.
Source:
Destination:
Step 3. Then choose Back Up Now or Back Up Later. If you choose Back up Now, MiniTool ShadowMaker will immediately deal with the backup task. If you choose Back Up Later, you can manage the backup task later under the Manage tab.
Tip: By clicking Options > Schedule Settings, you can set up a schedule for the backup, this makes your backup easy and reassuring. And, you can also click Options > Backup Options to customize the backup task, such as compressing the image file, shutting down the computer when the backup is finished, enabling password protection, verifying backup after creation, etc.
That’s how to image a hard drive using MiniTool ShadowMaker. Then let’s see how to restore the disk image.
Tip: If you are restoring the system disk image, you will need the help of MiniTool Bootable Media. How can you get the bootable media? Well, under Tools, you can find a tool named Media Builder, then follow the instructions below to do the preparatory job.
- How to create a bootable media using MiniTool Media Builder?
- How to boot from the bootable USB flash drive or CD/DVD disk?
Step 1. Navigate to Restore and select the backup task which needs restoring.
Step 2. Select a backup version and click Next.
Step 3. Then select the volumes to restore from the backup file. Note that the MBR and Track 0 should be chosen altogether. Then click Next to continue.
Step 4. Now select a disk for restoration. If the selected disk contains partitions, MiniTool ShadowMaker will inform you which partition will be deleted. Please be careful when selecting the target disk. Finally, you can click the Start button and wait until MiniTool ShadowMaker tells you all is done.
Try MiniTool ShadowMaker – a great disk imaging software.Click to Tweet
Top 2: Back up and Restore (Windows 7)
Well, despite MiniTool ShadowMaker being competent as a disk imaging software, many users stick to using the Windows built-in tool – Backup and Restore (Windows 7) to do disk imaging. Here let’s have a look at how to back up a disk using it.
Step 1. Open Control Panel and click Backup and Restore (Windows 7).
Step 2. Select Create a system image from the left panel.
Step 3. Now select a location to save the backup file. It is recommended to choose On a hard disk and select an external hard disk.
Step 4. Choose which drives to back up. Since we are doing disk imaging, choose all partitions on the disk (system partitions are selected by default).
Step 5. Finally, confirm your backup settings and hit Start backup if everything is alright.
You may also like: How to Restore Windows from a System Image?
Top 3: Iperius Backup
Iperius Backup offers hard disk cloning and restoration feature, which makes working faster. This tool allows sync with various cloud storage services like Amazon s3, Google Drive, etc. However, to use this program, you need a stable Internet connection.
Top 4: Clonezilla
There is another disk imaging software for you – Clonezilla. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup, and recovery. There are three versions of Clonezilla available to download: Clonezilla Live, Clonezilla Lite Server, and Clonezilla SE. However, this program doesn’t support decremental and incremental backup.
Top 5: Active Disk Image
The last disk imaging software is called Active Disk Image. With it, you can back up disks, including HDD, SSD, CD, DVD, USB flash drive, memory cards, USB, and more. It also supports scheduled backups. However, its paid edition is a little expensive.
Disk Cloning Software – MiniTool Software
There is another kind of backup software that is more straightforward than disk imaging software, and it is disk cloning software. Compared with disk imaging software, disk cloning software gets rid of the restoration process, which means you can use the backup copy immediately after the cloning. In this part, we would like to introduce two powerful programs.
1. MiniTool ShadowMaker
The first recommendation is MiniTool ShadowMaker. Clone Disk is another useful feature of the free backup software – MiniTool ShadowMaker, which is significant for hard drive upgrading. It can help you to clone hard drives or partitions to the SSD with ease and with great speed. The most important thing is that it would not give rise to data loss or would not bring any damage to data on the original entire drive during the cloning process. MiniTool ShadowMaker even can help you to clone the dynamic disk.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
2. MiniTool Partition Wizard
The second recommendation here is called MiniTool Partition Wizard. This is a powerful partition manager that can be used to do a lot of things, such as move partitions, resize partitions, break FAT32 limit, convert MBR to GPT to support 3TB disk, and so on. MiniTool Partition Wizard is also a disk cloning program that can be used to clone disks, migrate systems, and copy partitions.
MiniTool Partition Wizard DemoClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Further Reading: Disk Imaging VS. Disk Cloning VS. Copy & Paste
Now you know imaging software and cloning software are great choices when you need to carry out data protection. However, many users are not clear about the differences among copy & paste, clone, and image. After all, all of them can be regarded as backup methods. Thus they may choose an improper way to do system and application backup. Next, we will talk about their differences and in what situation should they be applied respectively.
Copy & Paste
Copy & paste is most commonly used to back up small amounts of personal files, such as pictures, excels, and movies. When you copy and paste files from one location to another, you only copy the files but abandon their additional data like the master boot record and the file allocation table, leading to some applications being unable to run. Most important of all, a copy & paste system backup won’t boot.
Disk Cloning
Disk cloning is most suitable for transferring the whole disk data to do hard drive upgrades. The reason? Disk copy will copy the entire contents of one hard drive to another including all the information that enables you to boot the operating system from the destination drive. Besides, data on the destination drive will be identical to the source drive when it was created.
It is worth mentioning that when you clone a hard drive, the target drive will be wiped usually and the drive can only be shared by only one cloning. If you need more copies, you should prepare more hard drives.
Disk Imaging
Disk imaging is a great prevention solution for backup issues. The process of making an image backup is very similar to that of disk cloning. However, one more step is carried out – file compression. Thus, a disk image needs to be opened and installed on the drive by using an imaging program before it can be used, which means you can’t restore a hard drive by simply placing original data with disk image files. Moreover, unlike disk cloning, a single hard drive can be shared with multiple disk images.
In a nutshell, copy & paste, disk imaging, and disk cloning are three ways to do a backup. Nevertheless, the latter two are more reliable ways, and it’s hard to tell which one is better. But here is one point you can refer to: when backing up drive A to B, if B is used to replace drive A, then disk cloning is more straightforward, you just clone A and use B; if you only backup A to B in case of an emergency, consider disk imaging software, for it is space-saving and more personalized.
Learn the differences among copy paste & disk cloning & disk imaging.Click to Tweet
Bottom Line
In this post, we mainly explain what is disk imaging software, why imaging software is needed, the differences among the most commonly used backup methods, and some available disk imaging software. Hope these are helpful to deal with your backup issues.
Now it’s your turn. Please try using MiniTool ShadowMaker to help back up data when there is a necessity. If you have any questions or suggestions for using MiniTool software, please leave us comments below or email [email protected]. Thanks for your cooperation.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Having been an editor at MiniTool since graduating college as an English major, Daisy specializes in writing about data backups, disk cloning, and file syncing as well as general computer knowledge and issues. In her free time, Daisy enjoys running and going with friends to the amusement park.