R-Drive Image - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

R-Drive Image is a disk cloning

Disk cloning

Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer hard disk to another disk or to an "image" file. Often, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image...

utility providing disk image files creation for backup or duplication purposes developed by R-Tools Technology Inc..

Backup process

A disk image file contains the exact, byte-by-byte copy of a hard drive, partition

Disk partitioning

Disk partitioning is the act of dividing a hard disk drive into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions, to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks. Partitions are also termed "slices" for operating systems based on BSD, Solaris or GNU Hurd...

or logical disk and can be created with various compression levels on the fly without stopping the Windows operating system and therefore without interrupting the user's business. These drive image files can then be stored in a variety of places, including various removable media such as CD-R(W)/DVD, Iomega Zip or Jazz disks, etc.

R-Drive Image restores the images on the original disks, on any other partitions or even on a hard drive's free space on the fly. To restore system and other locked partitions R-Drive Image is switched to the pseudo-graphic mode directly from Windows or bootable version created by the utility is launched from CD disc or diskettes.

Using R-Drive Image, a user can completely and rapidly restore a system after heavy data loss caused by an operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

crash, virus attack or hardware

Hardware

Hardware is a general term for equipment such as keys, locks, hinges, latches, handles, wire, chains, plumbing supplies, tools, utensils, cutlery and machine parts. Household hardware is typically sold in hardware stores....

failure. R-Drive Image can also be used for mass system deployment when a user needs to setup many identical computers. In other words, a user can manually setup one system only, create an image of the system, and then deploy it on all other computers, saving time and costs. If a user needs to restore only certain files from a disk image, he/she can connect that image as a virtual disk and copy those files directly from the disk image using Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer

This article is about the Windows file system browser. For the similarly named web browser, see Internet ExplorerWindows Explorer is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface...

or any other file utility.

File format

R-Drive Image uses its own closed/undocumented file format, with the .arc extension (unrelated to the data compression format also with the .arc extension

ARC (file format)

ARC is a lossless data compression and archival format by System Enhancement Associates . It was very popular during the early days of networked dial-up BBS. The file format and the program were both called ARC...

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.