By making a disk image of your computer you can protect your data and be up and running in case of a virus attack or a hard disk failure. You can also move the whole system to other computers by having your information duplicated. This is called hard disk cloning.
In this way you can set-up new computers with a set of ready data and software configurations really easy and fast. Actually there is no pure hard disk image backup software in the market.What these products do is they copy single hard disk partitions. Of course if the hard disk is composed of just one partition then it makes a copy of the whole disk image in the transfer. You may also look at more advanced products specially developed for partition copy and disk manipulation! One benefit by having a image from the hard disk on a backup is that in case of hard disk failure it is often a very quick procedure to restore the data from the backup. If the hard disk backup software is equipped with a free rescue start-up disk utility, and most of them are, then you do not need to install the operating system and backup software before you can copy and restore your hard drive image back to the hard drive.