Never thought about it this way
Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2016 3:51 pm
I never thought about the imaging process in this way, so I am asking:
is this the nuts and bolts behind what actually happens when one makes
an image using IFW or IFD or IFL? [see below]
[source: AskLeo Newsletter #620]:
Data – and only data – gets placed into an image file. It includes all
of the boot information, partition information, and overhead
information, with your files and folders, and compiles it all into an
image file. Since it doesn’t contain any of the drive marked as free
space, an image is typically much smaller than the actual size of the
drive you’re backing up; it’s proportional to how much disk space has
actually been used.
A full-image backup has two main differences from a clone:
Free space is completely ignored.
The layout of the files on the disk is completely ignored.
Typically, an imaging program copies one file at a time. It looks for a
file on C:, copies it to the image file, and moves on to the next file.
That process removes any fragmentation present on the original drive.
The net result is that the back-up file represents a completely
defragmented image. In other words, all of the files are sitting next to
each other, perfectly contiguous. When you restore an image file to an
empty hard drive, all the files come back perfectly defragmented (in
fact, that is one way to defragment a drive completely: back it up to
an image and immediately restore it).
AlanD
is this the nuts and bolts behind what actually happens when one makes
an image using IFW or IFD or IFL? [see below]
[source: AskLeo Newsletter #620]:
Data – and only data – gets placed into an image file. It includes all
of the boot information, partition information, and overhead
information, with your files and folders, and compiles it all into an
image file. Since it doesn’t contain any of the drive marked as free
space, an image is typically much smaller than the actual size of the
drive you’re backing up; it’s proportional to how much disk space has
actually been used.
A full-image backup has two main differences from a clone:
Free space is completely ignored.
The layout of the files on the disk is completely ignored.
Typically, an imaging program copies one file at a time. It looks for a
file on C:, copies it to the image file, and moves on to the next file.
That process removes any fragmentation present on the original drive.
The net result is that the back-up file represents a completely
defragmented image. In other words, all of the files are sitting next to
each other, perfectly contiguous. When you restore an image file to an
empty hard drive, all the files come back perfectly defragmented (in
fact, that is one way to defragment a drive completely: back it up to
an image and immediately restore it).
AlanD