The process addressed above will automatically initiate the recovery software to read the tape and locate the first Image set. Note that the target disk can be the original unbootable disk or a new disk right out of the box. No formatting other than a standard low level disk format is required. Whatever was on the original disk, including multiple partitions with various operating systems will be restored exactly as it was last backed up. This process also allows an administrator to go to another machine with the same, or similar configuration and perform a recovery and quickly turn the alternative machine into the identity of the failed machine.
Image backup can work in conjunction with both disk and server mirroring.
Currently, image restores can only be made to the local drives on a machine from its local tape drive. Image backups are limited in that incremental and differential backups cannot be performed. RAID users will often partition a large RAID enclosure into many logical drives including a small operating system partition. This is not good for the image which sees the total of the array as one physical disk unless the goal is to really do an image backup of all the partitions. Using this technology, an NT server can backup its operating system disk using image, backup other local hard drives containing open database files such as Exchange and SQL with guaranteed integrity, and perform either full, incremental or differential backups of any connected disk drive on the network to the same tape during the same session.