Everyone knows that backing up your data is a no-brainer. It's not a matter of whether your hard drive will fail, but when it will fail, and how you'll recover. Seasoned IT professionals know that imaging hard drives and partitions is much better than copying data to CD or DVD or keeping an army of external hard drives connected to your machine. DriveImage XML is a free utility that helps make the imaging process easy to manage and simple to do.
Most IT departments at large companies rely on drive imaging to back up and deploy systems from servers to laptops. Imaging your drive means you can take a good, working installation, complete with your favorite programs, settings, bookmarks, and files; back everything up to a single file; and keep that file safe on an external drive. If your system dies, you have Windows problems that you can't fix, or you need to replace your hard drive, then you can download the image to your formatted hard drive or replacement hard drive and be up and running again without having to download programs and spend time installing things.
DriveImage allows you to do this, and even automate regular imaging and backups using Windows' built-in task scheduler. The app allows you to back up logical drives and partitions and copy them across network shares or back them up to external hard drives automatically. It also lets you image new hard drives with images that you've saved. You can even browse the contents of an old image to see if it has all the updates or settings that you're looking for before you use it for something.
DriveImage uses Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services (VSS), a tool built into Windows that means you don't have to boot up to a CD or DVD to image your drive. Most other drive imaging tools require you to boot up to a special disk or CD to properly image your system, assuming that it can't get an accurate image if the disk is in use. Because DriveImage uses VSS, you can stay online and image your system at the same time. Additionally, because DriveImage stores your images in XML format, other tools can browse the image files as well.
DriveImage XML supports only Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003, and is completely free. You can download and install the tool, or you can grab a copy of the WinPE boot CD that has DriveImage XML on it.
[ via Lifehacker ]
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