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Data Recovery and Disk Imaging

Knowledge of disk imaging is needed for all those grappling with various aspect of data recovery. A regular computer user should be well aware of the fact that data stored on hard disks are vulnerable and can be lost due to several reasons, most of which may not be in your control.

So the best policy is to backup the important data on your hard drive so that, you are not left with the costly and time consuming option of data recovery in case of damage to storage media. Many a time, you can save yourself the trouble of data recovery if you bothered to create a disk image, from which you can actually re create the entire storage media as it was when you imaged it.

Disk Imaging is one of the common and popular ways of backing up your important data. Other ways of backing up the data include, offsite back up, network backup, online backup, CD back up, DVD back up and the like.

What is Disk Imaging and how does it help in data recovery?

Disk Imaging is a specialized process of creating an exact image of the disk at a particular point in time. One can even compare a disk image to a photograph. The disk image is capable of being recreated (read data recovery) into the actual disk contents in the same way a photograph can be used to recreate a particular scene in a particular point of time in the past.

This way even if you lose your data, you can safely recreate the hard disk to the way it was with the help of the disk image, making data recovery a child's play. Disk image in fact, makes an exact copy of the partition tables and the file system. There is also something called the Ghost Image, in which even the nitty gritty of the operating system, the system settings and device drivers will also be incorporated into the image.

Thus after you do a data recovery with the help of a ghost image, you can actually boot up to a desktop and system configuration that is exactly the same as your crashed disk!

How to make disk image and use it for data recovery?

Disk image is made with the help of special software. Several such ready-made softwares are easily available and can be downloaded from the Internet. Apart from a few freeware and shareware, limited edition trialware are also available on the web. The most popular and professional imaging software called The Norton Ghost, is made by the Symantec Corporation.

The disk image should not be stored on the same disk, which you want to protect from data loss. The disk image is normally a heavy file running into several mega bytes of data depending on the size of the disk you are imaging. This disk image, made using special software made especially for the purpose, should be ideally stored on a removable storage media like CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-R or DVD-RW.

Data recovery using the disk image can normally be done with the help of the same software you used for making the image. In most cases, you can find all the data recovery instructions from the manuals of the help files of the disk imaging software.