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Cloning, in plain terms, is the creation of an identical entity. Various field of studies are attributed to this term mostly biological in nature. In the past, controversies regarding its application in humans made a head turn making this term widely known.
Through the years, this term never cease its popularity, until computer experts started to use this terminology describing specific computer software and applications.
In particular, a Virtual Clone Drive, was born bringing new leaps in the computing world.
For the PC expert, a Virtual CloneDrive is a disk image emulator. It is specially designed to mount images created by disk image emulator software, although it can mount many other disk image formats as well.
It emulates your computer’s CD/DVD-ROM drive allowing you to run CD/DVD applications from the hard disk without the need for physical CD/DVD drives or the actual CD/DVD media.
In plain terms, it can play your favorite CD/DVD movie without CD/DVD drivers built into your computer and you can play games and run CD/DVD applications without the need of mounting physical discs at a faster speed.
Virtual Clone Drive convert your CDs and unprotected DVDs into “virtual CDs” — disc images that run directly on your hard drive, replacing physical discs and saving wear and tear on your CD-ROM drive. Along with this, sharing virtual CDs over a network is possible, and access rates are multiple times faster than physical CDs, boosting the performance of PC games, photo CDs, and disc-based applications.
A Virtual Clone Drive is the emulated drive derivative or simply the copycat drive. Normally, a virtual drive is created whenever a drive is emulated in some fashion. The drive being emulated could be a hard drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD or a network share among others. A virtual hard drive can be created from RAM for fast read/write access.
see fig. below:
Notice that whenever you click DVD-Drive (E:), in case you have one, it asks for the DVD to be mounted on the tray.
[fig. shows DVD-RAM Drive (D:) and DVD-Drive (E:)]Here, DVD-Drive (E:) serves as a virtual DVD Drive since before I even installed a Virtual Clone Drive Software, it used to have only the (D:), I have a DVD Rewriter installed but had not installed its DVD driver disc in order to play a DVD movie not until I used a Virtual Clone Drive Software.]
Virtual DVDs are often mounted as disk images via disk image emulator software. This allows the content of a CD or DVD to be read from the disk image on a hard drive, rather than a disc drive. This may also allow users to run software that requires a CD or a DVD, without the need of having a registered copy in the disc drive.
Virtual hard disks are most commonly used in on the fly disk encryption OTFE software such as FreeOTFE and BestCrypt, where an encrypted “image” of a disk is stored on the PC. When you enter the disks password, the disk image is “mounted”, and made available as a new drive letter on your PC. Files written to this virtual drive are written to the encrypted image, and never stored in clear text.
The process of making such an encrypted disk available for use is called mounting, the process of removing it is called dismounting.
Network shares mounted as local drives:
- FTP and SFTP can be also mapped as a virtual drive with a software called ‘netdrive’ or ‘sftpdrive’.
- VMware emulated PCs use unencrypted disk images which may be mounted on a PC outside VMware as an emulated disk.
- Webdav – which does not exactly act like a physical disk.
As mentioned above, a disk image emulator is computer software designed to mount a disk image, usually of a CD or DVD, from a local hard drive or USB flash drive. The mounting is usually done by creating a virtual drive on the system, that to the operating system looks like an ordinary disk drive, in other words disc reading hardware is substituted with disc images.
Some OS have this functionality while others such as Microsoft Windows require additional software.
Uses of a Disk Image Emulator includes:
- Enables users to avoid constantly switching out discs.
- Helps prevent scratching, which can cause permanent damage to a disc.
- Speeds up access times as hard drives are faster than optical drives
- Provides a backup copy of a disc, in case the original becomes damaged, lost, or stolen.
- Enables users to carry large disc libraries without the physical burden of the discs.
- Emulates multiple disks, which is useful for installing or using software that shipped on multiple disks.
- Can make a disc accessible to users on a network, which is very practical when it is impossible to distribute the discs to all of the users on a network.
- Allows programs that can normally only work with optical discs (like some DVD-Video applications) to access data on a hard drive. For often-used CD and DVD discs, where simply copying the disc to a hard drive won’t work.
- A CD/DVD master used to burn physical discs.
- Make disc accessible to machines without disc drive.
- Save power by turning off disc drive, for instance on laptops span.
- Makes the computer quieter, many removable disc drives are noisier than hard disks.
Security disk images can be encrypted, and decrypted only when accessed
Some emulator software, such as FreeOTFE and Sentry 2020 are designed to emulate a hard drive, and encrypt the disk image stored. This provides an easy to use, and secure, means of encrypting files in bulk by simply storing files on the virtual drive which is created when the disk image is mounted.
This form of disk emulation is often referred to as “OTFE” (on-the-fly encryption). After the spread of broadband, CD and DVD disk images became a common medium for Linux distributions. Online data and bootable recovery CD images are provided for customers of certain commercial software companies.
“Having installed a Virtual Clone Drive Software on my PC helped primarily in saving hard disk space, but most of all, the functionality of this software makes it easier to play CD/DVD without the need of installing the DVD driver CD since it is already taken care of by the disk image emulator. Truly, this software is definitely worth having!”
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