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What A Disk Image Is And When To Make One
A disk image is a single file that holds an exact copy of a drive, sector by sector, from the first byte to the last. It copies everything, including the files you can see, the deleted ones, the damaged ones and the empty space between them. If a drive is a book, a disk image is a photocopy of every page, blank ones included.
Most people never need one. The people who do need one need it badly, and usually at the worst moment.
Why Copy A Drive Instead Of Scanning It
A healthy drive can be scanned as many times as you like. A weak one cannot. Every read on a drive with failing sectors or a tired motor uses up a little of what is left, and a Deep Scan reads everything. Run three scans on a dying disk and the third may not finish.
An image moves the risk. You read the weak drive once, carefully, and write the result onto a healthy drive. From then on every scan runs against the image file. The weak drive goes back in its box.
When To Make One
- Drive Health shows Warning or Failing, or the health percentage has dropped since you last looked.
- The drive is slow, freezes for seconds at a time or disconnects and reconnects on its own.
- Windows reports read errors, or a copy stalls partway through the same file every time.
- It holds the only copy of something you cannot replace and you have one chance to get it right.
- You must hand the original drive back to an office or a client and want to keep working on the data.
How DRE Pro Does It
- Connect a healthy drive with free space at least equal to the weak drive's full size, whether or not the weak drive is full.
- Open Make An Image Of A Drive. Pick the weak drive as the source and a folder on the healthy drive as the destination.
- Start it and leave both drives alone until it finishes. DRE Pro only reads the source, and if the drive drops out for a moment it waits for it rather than giving up.
- When it is done, open Scan This Image, choose the file you made and run Quick Scan, Deep Scan or RAW Scan on it exactly as you would on a drive.
- Save recovered files to a third place, not onto the weak drive and not on top of the image.
Image Or Clone
People use the words loosely. In DRE Pro a clone copies a disk to another disk, so the second disk can be used in place of the first. That lives under Clone Or Migrate A Disk, where Clone Entire Disk copies disk to disk and Migrate Windows moves a working Windows to a new drive. An image copies a disk to a file, for scanning and safe keeping.
If you want to clone a failing hard drive so you can keep using what is on it, image it first and recover from the image. Cloning a failing drive straight onto another drive copies the damage along with everything else, and a second pass over the bad sectors may be the one that finishes the drive off.
Choosing Disk Imaging Software
Any disk imaging software worth using copies sector by sector, including the empty space, reads the source without writing a byte to it and carries on past bad sectors rather than stopping at the first one. It should also open the image for scanning afterwards, since an image you cannot scan is only a large file. In DRE Pro the image and the scan are two screens in the same app, so nothing has to be converted between tools.
Keep The Image
Hold on to the image until every file you need is saved and opened from its new place. If a Quick Scan on the image misses something, run a Deep Scan on the same image. If that misses something, try RAW Scan for the file types you care about. None of these touch the original drive. That is the whole point.