You may never have had a hard drive fail or become so corrupted that your data was beyond retrieval, but that doesn't mean you never will. And think of this: If your system ever fails in a hardware or software disaster, will you really have time to reinstall Windows and all your applications and tweak all your OS and application settings? I'm guessing the answer is no. I certainly don't. This is why you need a drive-imaging program that backs up your complete system—including all your data and applications—and can restore it all in minutes.

Traditional backup programs (see our roundup of these file-backup utilities) back up your documents, photos, music, and spreadsheets. Drive-imaging programs do much more. They do back up your data, of course, but they also back up your applications, your whole Windows system, and all the low-level drivers and software that you normally never notice but without which Windows can't manage. An ordinary backup program copies your files. A drive-imaging program makes a byte-by-byte duplicate of your full hard drive (or of one or more partitions if you've divided your physical drive into multiple logical drives), maintaining the identical data structure.

Hence, if your drive fails, you can pop in a new drive and restore your system to exactly the state it was in when you made the drive image. For that matter, if your system becomes unstable because you installed software that won't uninstall cleanly, you simply write over the drive (or partition) with the stable system you were using a few days ago. You've probably noticed that Windows' System Restore often doesn't restore your system because it doesn't image your drive. Instead, it performs fancy tricks with the Windows Registry and other Windows files—tricks that work on a clean, simple system but are too complicated to perform reliably on a heavily used real-world system. Drive-imaging software, by contrast, always restores your system.

Of course, you could achieve the same result by reinstalling Windows and all your drivers and applications—if you can find them again. And then you could use a conventional backup program to restore your data. But that process would likely take a day or two, if you're lucky, and your system still won't have all the tweaks and customizations that make it your own.

Drive-imaging software is worth having even if your hard drive never fails. You can use the software to clone a single system to multiple computers. Some products let you make an image of your current Windows system and then transfer the whole system to a new computer that uses different hardware without installing Windows from scratch—something that's normally impossible when you upgrade to a new machine.

Today's imaging software can work in the background even while you're running your system. It can also create incremental backups, which speed the process by storing just the changes made to your drive since the last full backup. If your drive or system fails, you can boot from an emergency CD, then restore your system from the backup image. Most of these products provide a bootable CD that you can use to boot your machine when Windows won't boot from the hard drive, or when you don't want to boot to a corrupted Windows system. If you boot from the emergency CD, you can run the imaging software from a copy of the software on the CD itself—you don't need to use the copy installed on your hard drive. You can then restore your system from an image backup on an external, network, or DVD drive, or even from an image that you stored on a partition of your hard drive that you use for storing data.

Even when your system is running smoothly, these utilities can help you out by letting you dig into a backup image to get back an older version of any file on your system. Imaging software includes a feature that lets you "mount" an image so that it appears as a drive letter in Windows Explorer, then copy files from the mounted image to your hard drive. These products can also copy partitions from one physical hard drive to another, a feature most useful with partitions that contain data only (rather than a full Windows system, since, on a new machine, the OS usually requires an actual installation). —Next: What I Found >

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