After downloading a disk image like the popular ISO image used for CD/DVD disks, you have to either load it in the virtual disk drive that allows you to access the contents of the disk image without burning it to a physical disk first, or you have to actually burn it to a real physical disk. You can also create a USB flash disk or memory card because the use of the optical media is slowly declining and the flash memory based devices like SD cards or USB pen drives are getting popular. There are different tools that allow you to create and burn the disks using a disk image and Etcher is the latest in this category of software.
Etcher is created by the Resin software company and they have made it open source recently. Etcher is able to create the physical disks copies from the disk images of three formats – ISO, ZIP and IMG. It can work with USB flash disks or the memory cards. Etcher is basically used flash the OS images supported by the Resin.io, but it is also able to flash other kind of disk images.
Etcher makes it very easy to create the disk copies using the disk images. The whole task is completed using just three steps. In the first step, you have to select the ISO, IMG OR ZIP disk image file. In the second step, you have to choose the destination disk (usually the flash disk or memory card). And finally in the third step, you have to burn the disk image onto to the destination disk.
When the process is complete, it will automatically mount the newly created disk copy in Windows Explorer so you can check out the contents of the disk easily. If you do not want auto-mounting after the burning is complete, then you can change this option from the Etcher settings.
You can download either the 32-bit version of Etcher or the 64-bit version of Etcher depending on the architecture of your operating system.