Originating Author: Aaron Bowers
Hard drive imaging allows you to create a model system that you want your other systems to mirror. This method requires special software to clone the contents of the entire hard disk or disks to any number of target systems.
This method is highly scalable. You can clone one system to any number of systems simultaneously over a local network connection. It's also generally very fast -- especially if the cloning software you choose has intimate knowledge of the file systems used on the model system, such that it can distinguish between data and free space.
One problem with hard drive imaging arises when you use a large hard disk and a file system with which the cloning software is unfamiliar. In this situation, the software will copy the source hard disk block by block, making no distinction between free space and data. With large modern hard disks this can take tens of hours to complete, and when an error is encountered, you must start the process again from the beginning.
Hard drive imaging
Advantages
- Create exact duplicate of contents of one hard disk/volume to another
- Deliver hard drive images over the network to one or many systems simultaneously
- Resize individual partitions of many file systems of which the utility (e.g. Ghost) has intimate knowledge
Disadvantages
- Lack of intimate knowledge of file systems forces block by block copy of source hard disk into image, which can take a long time to complete for large disks
- Offers little detection or recovery from errors during image generation and deployment
- The best hard disk imagers are commercial and expensive
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