Usesĭisk images are used heavily for duplication of optical media including DVDs, Blu-ray disks, etc. Disk images became much more popular when floppy disk media became popular, where replication or storage of an exact structure was necessary and efficient, especially in the case of copy protected floppy disks. Historyĭisk images were originally (in the late 1960s) used for backup and disk cloning of mainframe disk media, the early ones were as small as 5 megabytes and as large as 330 megabytes, and the copy medium was magnetic tape, which ran as large as 200 megabytes per reel. Some disk imaging utilities are filesystem-aware and can omit copying unused space from the source media, or compress the disk they represent to reduce storage requirements. Depending on the disk image format, a disk image may span one or more computer files.ĭisk image file formats may be open standards, such as the ISO image format for optical disc images, or proprietary to particular software applications.Īs disk images contain the contents of entire disks, they can be huge. A disk image is usually made by creating a sector-by-sector copy of the source medium, thereby perfectly replicating the structure and contents of a storage device independent of the file system.

Disk images, in computing, are computer files containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc or USB flash drive.

Hdd disk image creator