Imaging, also known as Ghosting in the Windows world, is the act of creating a sector-by-sector copy of a hard-drive and saving it to a file, or transferring it to another hard-drive. Such uses for imaging include:

• Backup to an image file
• Clone to another hard-drive (eg: building multiple identical workstations) either directly or via an image file
• Data recovery (it’s safer and easier to examine an image file than risk further damage to the hard-drive itself)

Linux has a neat little command that can do this for us called simply “dd”. It is completely filesystem independent, so you can backup any hard-drive regardless of whether it was Linux formatted, Mac formatted or Windows formatted. It copies the drive bit by bit, sector by sector, not file by file.

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