Hard drives are designed to contain and keep amounts of files that will be of great use. Although technologically made, hard drives are subject to fail or crash. They may operate perfectly in a given period of time, but because of the fact that they are not created equal, there's always a great possibility for them to fail and leave you frustrated and bothered with lost files. Worse is that hard drives crash often without warnings, although there are some instances that error messages and certain noises occur to give you a hint. Because of this, it would always be great if you do some back ups with anything stored in your drive, and this can be done through the help of drive image.

A drive image is essentially a large single file that stores and reproduces all the files contained by a hard disk and other storage device. It is considered by most people as a real time saver simply for the fact that it works to restore all the files back to their original forms even after a drive crash. If the copying and restoration is done correctly, one thing remains true and beneficial to computer users, that is, they do not have to reinstall Windows and other applications just to get everything back to normal again.How to Create a Drive Image

The drive image comes in a number of sizes. Typically, they come with a size ranging from megabytes to gigabytes. So depending on the capacity of the system you take, you can restore files in numbers. It is further notable also that the drive images end in a variety of extensions. The most common are .iso, .bin, .img, and .cue. You will find some files stored as .dmg though, especially if what you're using is a Macintosh computer.

Now, knowing the basics of drive image and how they work as an excellent solution for creating file backups of hard disk, you probably are interested in knowing the basic steps to developing your own drive image. Well, the steps are relatively simple. All you need to do is to familiarize the features of your PC and follow everything directed step-by-step. To create a drive image, you will need first to set the ActiveFile Recovery, for instance. Once activated, choose a storage device that you want to create a particular image with.

If the right device is selected, pen the Create Disk Image box, which typically appears in a size of dialog cube. From there, look for the Create Image feature and click on it. You can find thus specific feature right on the toolbar. Then, right click the selected portion on the hard disk and choose Create Image found on the context menu.

Look for the Save In part which comes in a form of drop-down list. Choose another logical drive. Proceed by browsing through your folders, the ones where you want to transfer the files labeled as Disk Image. You can change the name of your disk image by typing the name of your choice right in the File Name section. To finish, click save.

Note that after clicking "Save", the transfer of the files is not yet complete until the files are all copied to the new location. You will about the completion of the file transfer as it is commonly shown in a box that pops up on your PC's screen. In case, you want to cancel the drive image creation process, just press Stop anytime.

So that's basically it! Although that easy, always make sure to create a drive image on a separate drive other than the original source device. Do not save a drive onto itself, to simply put.