Imaging a laptop hard drive is a task that you end up doing in the event you need to take a snapshot of a drive to use as a backup of that drive. I prefer to create a disk image instead of using the traditional backup software. The reason is because if you backup a drive with special commercial off the shelf backup software, you have to use that same software to restore the files you backed up. I prefer to create an image of the drive so that in the event of the hard drive failing or a client requesting to transfer their data to a new machine, the drive image is the best way to insure you have a valid workable backup that does not require a unique software package to restore your data. 
This image can also be converted to a VHD (Virtual Hard Drive), which allows you to load it into a Virtual Machine and used as if it was a working physical machine. The only down-side is when you restore your files from the image back onto the drive, you are restoring everything as it was since that image was created. Any new data since that point would not exist. More »
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