Turn Back Time With Disk Imaging | Hard Disk Backup

There will always be times when the only way to restore yuor PC to its former glory is to bite the bullect and reinstall windows. This process, however, created its own problems, not least that you'll have to also reinstall all your applications.

If you do decide to reinstall windows, or have just bought a new PC, it's worth investing in some disk-imaging software. Imaging is the process of creating a snapshot of your hard disk, enabling you to return your PC to that precise state. It's best to create the image after you've installed all your essential software, so when you re-image your hard disk you'll have everything up and running.

Acronis True Image(http://www.acronis.com.sg/) is a popular application that's both easy to use and feature rich. Imaging software can be used to return to a clean OS install.

As well as creating images on entire disks, it can be used to clone discks and backup files to an FTP site. A free trial is available from Acronis' website.

Those of you with windows vista (Home Premium or Ultimate) have a disk-imaging tool built-in the windows complete system backup creates an image file that you can restore by booting your PC from the orginal vista installation DVD.