For years I have been crowing about the benefits of using Disk Imaging technology as part of your backup regime. For those who don’t know, unlike traditional file only backups, disk imaging effectively takes a snapshot of your hard disk at the point in time that the imaging starts. This image contains everything from the files, data and settings of your system as well as the MBR (master boot record) and the partitions of your hard drive.

This brings several benefits to users. The main one, although not the most exciting, is that it contains all of your files. No more realising you haven’t been backing up that vital folder and now you’ve lost some client data etc. With disk imaging you are getting everything, every time.

The second one and the thing I love is that if you have a full image of your system then in the event of your hard disk dying, you just need to slot a new one in and restore the image to this disk. Within the hour you are back up and running just like nothing had happened. Try doing this with a traditional file only backup and see how far you get.

“If you can restore your system to a new hard drive in the same PC, then we can’t be that far away from restoring a system to a new PC with dissimilar hardware” I hear you cry. You are quite right, we arent that far away at all and infact the big disk imaging boys (Acronis & Paragon) have had the tools to allow you to do this for some years but you always pay over the odds for it. How does it work? Here comes the technical bit:

Windows (and other Operating Systems) need to be able to access the hardware in the system-so that your mouse pointer moves when you move the mouse, so that your graphics card can create the game character on your screen, and so your mp3s can be played out of your speakers etc. To do this it has a layer between the physical hardware and the software called the HAL (Hardware abstraction layer). Its this layer that holds the drivers (files which tell the hardware how to behave and how windows handles it). To be able to restore your system to new hardware we need to break the HAL and inject the drivers for the new hardware (primarily the hard drive controller so that windows can see the new hard disk the restored system is on). Acronis and Paragon both managed to do this and released Acronis Universal Restore and Paragon P2P (Physical to Physical) respectively.

Many a time these tools have saved my bacon and speeded up my work no end.

Anyway back to the topic, Paragon have just released their disk imaging offering for PCs for FREE. Thats right, not a penny to spend (except on some additional storage to keep these images on!). Unfortunately, this free version doesnt include the P2P technology but it does feature P2Virtual so you can recreate your system as a virtual machine. You now have no excuse not to use imaging as part of your regime!

Donwload it now from HERE