Hard drive images are a point in time recovery option. We need to rebooted the PC and an image of the entire disk is captured in a state that it can be restored in its entirety back to a hard drive. This could be used for hard drive failure, virus infection, software update that did not go as expected.
Using this image restores the PC totally to the exact state when the drive image was captured. This is usually used in conjunction with data archiving to be able to restore newer data that has been run, but maybe not processed or reported yet.
This image can also be used to restore a specific file from within that image. This can be used if a method or configuration file becomes corrupted. Maybe if a user overwrote the instrument configuration file or deleted all of your methods or calibration data.
Any time there is a major system change, software update or repair planned for an instrument PC, lab staff should be requesting that a drive image should be captured before this occurs. If the change is successful and after it has been fully tested, another image should be requested. You would now have an updated image that you could recover from in the future with the new changes.
If the repair or update is unsuccessful, we would roll the PC back to before the change was made. Then maybe a different process or update could be tried to see if that would be more successful.
Staff also have the option to manually copy over files from the PC to the same folder on the instrument data server that the instrument data get backed up to. This can be helpful if you have a method or configuration file that may only change once a year after validation. That way if something gets changed, you have an easy way to restore back that file on your own.
You can request a image using this service: Instrument - Imaging