In this digital realm, data storage has become a major challenge for anyone. Data forms the backbone of a business and securing this data is important to implement your long term business continuity plan. You can easily lose this data to disk crashes, media corruption, malware attack, or any other form of disaster. To secure your confidential information from these unpredictable catastrophes, you need to back it up. A backup solution should be able to perform all types of backups, including full, incremental, or differential. Moreover, a backup tool should also provide additional security using passwords and encryption.
A typical backup type that proves to be a valuable asset is Image backup. An image backup is also known as a complete system backup, as you can copy each sector on your hard drive to another drive or a tape. Image backups are created to make an exact copy of the system and restore data from this copy when the system fails or the drive is replaced. However, you cannot restore an image backup to another system having a different operating system. The benefit of using an image backup lies in the fact that you can easily restore your machine anytime back to its original state, including the operating system, applications, their preferences, and data files.
Mac users work with a number of heavy-weight applications and tons of data. They require backing up this data frequently along with the applications, system files, and user preferences. The best way to accomplish this is making a binary copy of the entire hard drive sector by sector, i.e. image backup of the drive. An image backup usually contains raw disk data. Thus, a disk written in an unknown format or having bad sectors can also be imaged using a good disk imaging software.
Nowadays, a range of Mac Drive Imaging tools is available in the market. These software are adept at creating an exact duplicate of your Mac hard drive. Some of these utilities remove unused file space and bad sectors from the source media while creating the image. They also facilitate cloning of Mac based hard drives or volumes. With the help of these tools, you can safely replicate the contents and structure of any storage media to another media (usually external drive or tape). These software support imaging and cloning for HFS, HFS+, and FAT based drives. Further, they are compatible with the latest Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
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Guest article written by: Vishal, is a part of Mac data recovery team, a blogger, actively participating in Social Media and loves to listen iTunes. His area of expertise includes recovering data from a Mac HDD, taking back-ups through cloning & imaging utilities, time-machine etc.
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Guest article written by: Vishal, is a part of Mac data recovery team, a blogger, actively participating in Social Media and loves to listen iTunes. His area of expertise includes recovering data from a Mac HDD, taking back-ups through cloning & imaging utilities, time-machine etc.
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Hi Vishal,
Heard little about image backups before. Could understand a lot about this feature after reading your post. Truly an asset this is, as written by you. A great advice for all those struggle with data storage. Thanks a lot for sharing this idea.
Regards,
Sanjib
This is a useful information, since image hosting now a days are not stable. This might be the solution to become worry-free about your treasured and valued images.