Drive imaging

1 Get started

A Windows drive usually contains several volumes. This wasn’t always the case, but nowadays there’s normally a hidden recovery volume for restoring a working system in the event of disaster. Creating an image of the entire drive is the quickest and surest way to make sure you’ve backed up every part of it. Start the process by clicking to the drive operation tab.

3 Specify target and options

It’s vital to ensure your source files are correctly backed up, so click “More options…” and select “Validate image when completed”. If you’re leaving the backup unattended you might also want to shut down upon completion. You can also add a comment with details of your backup. Finally, specify a target media for the image: we’re using a NAS drive.

2 Select volumes

To select an entire drive for backup, simply tick the box beside its name. Our PC only has one drive, so it’s easy to identify. If you only want to image certain volumes, select these instead. Keep an eye on the cumulative size, to make sure you have enough space to store the result on your destination media. Once you’re ready, click “Start drive imaging”.

4 Create and restore the image

Click Start to begin writing the image to disk. This can take a while; you should ideally avoid using your PC until it has completed . To restore the data, return to the “Drive operation” tab and click “Start drive restoration”. You can create a new incremental image by picking “Image of the changes” and selecting the existing archive; DiskImage will only store data that’s changed.