

Disk images can be made in a variety of formats depending on the purpose. Disk imaging is done for a variety of purposes including digital forensics, cloud computing, system administration, as part of a backup strategy, and legacy emulation as part of a digital preservation strategy. Compression and deduplication are commonly used to reduce the size of the image file set. Traditionally, disk images were bit-by-bit copies of every sector on a hard disk often created for digital forensic purposes, but it is now common to only copy allocated data to reduce storage space.

For ISO 9660 image files, see ISO image.Ī disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's structure and data typically stored in one or more computer files on another storage device.
