"I often use imaging software to replicate the contents of a disk drive. One of the advantages of using this process is that imaging software creates an exact copy of the contents of one disk on another. It can also simultaneously deliver hard drive images to multiple systems over the network, saving time and ensuring that each disk is an exact copy of the original one. Finally, if the imaging software can identify the individual partitions of file systems, it can resize them for multiple file systems. If it is unable to do this, it must copy the contents of the source drive into the destination images block by block, which takes a long time for larger disks. Another disadvantage of using imaging software to duplicate disk drives is that they offer limited opportunities to identify and recover from errors that occur during the copying and writing of the image. Additionally, good imaging software can be expensive."
