Managing Drive Images

Using drive images will save you time and money. How many hours a year do you spend configuring new PCs? How about reconfiguring those hosed by malware? The hardware takes no time to assemble, so all of that time is spent on software installs and configuration. My solution? Create a series of hard drive images of good PC configurations and install them on bare metal as needed. A drive image is an archive—a backup—containing the total contents and structure of a hard drive or other media. It contains all the information needed to create an exact duplicate of the original drive, including, for our purposes, the operating system, applications, data, directory structure, and configuration. Many modern drive-imaging utilities can create a single compressed file containing a drive image, which saves storage space. The Process Drive... [read full story]