
Of course, all your personal settings user-installed software and personal data files are not restored. Restoring the contents of the rescue disk returns the hard drive to its factory-new state. The "rescue disk" that comes with some computers is a clone of the computer's hard drive as it was at the time it was shipped by the manufacturer. Wherever the disk image is stored, having access to the whole disk image or just individual files in it is an excellent safety net against hard drive crashes. It can be stored on a network drive, a web server, or in cloud storage. A disk image can be stored on a hard drive, or offline media such as DVDs. Think of it as a snapshot of your hard drive. A hard drive clone or image is often stored as a single, huge file called a "disk image" file.
