Ever have a hard drive burn out completely? I have. It’s no fun. It’s even less fun when you discover that while your backup brought back all your files, it didn’t do such a hot job on your applications, Windows registry, and drivers. You know — all the stuff that spells the difference between a good-enough PC and a PC that works exactly the way you want it to.

And, needless to say, if your business needs to roll out anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand PCs with identical-to-the-last-detail software loads, then drive imaging (also called disk mirroring) software is your friend.

Drive-imaging programs work by making a byte-by-byte duplicate of the full hard drive or selected partition. This way, if your drive does go to that big bit-farm in the sky, you simply slide in a new hard drive and have a working clone of your PC back up and running. Or, if your PC turns out to be as dead as a Norwegian Blue Parrot, you can restore your working system to a new computer with relatively little fuss or muss.

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