Data storage devices are more reliable today than they ever have been. Back in the 90’s hard drives were not as much reliable as they are today and data loss due to hardware failure was very common. Even though hard drives have improved, now you face data loss due to some other newer threats such as ransomware attacks. The only reliable way to ensure data safety is to keep regular backups of your hard drives. You can use TeraByte “Image for Windows” software for creating a backup for the entire hard drive and cloning one hard drive to another.
During the installation the software offers two interfaces – easy or traditional. The easy interface is the newer one and is recommended for everyone. In this interface, you can pick a task such as backup, restore, validate or copy and depending on the task chosen, it will take you through a wizard for all the necessary steps.
The backup task can backup your entire hard drive or partition from within Windows with the help of VSS (volume shadow service) or PhyLock (a component from TeraByte Unlimited). Using any of these, you can create a complete backup of your hard drive even when any files are in use.
In the Image for Windows window, you can choose to create TBWinRE boot disk. This feature is able to create either RE (recovery environment) or PE (pre-installation environment). The RE entry does not require any special components and can be added to the boot entries of Windows. But for PE, you have to download Windows AIK or Windows ADK.
Apart from backup and restore, you can clone hard drives using Image for Windows. For this, you need at least two hard drives connected to your PC. Then you can copy the contents of one hard drive to another creating an exact identical hard drive.
If you do not want to restore the entire backup and want to extract only a few files, then Image for Windows provides with two tools TBIMount and TBIView. Using these tools, you can mount the backup images (TBI files) and view there contents.
TeraByte Image for Windows is free-for-use only for 30 days and displays a 30 seconds long nag window every time you launch it. After 30 days you have to buy a license key. If you have created backups then you won’t be able to restore hard drives using those backups unless you pay for the full version. Nonetheless, TeraByte Image for Windows provides an easy-to-use interface to carry out all the basic image backup and closing tasks.
You can download TeraByte Image for Windows from https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm.