| Product: |
Backup Software in general |
| Date: |
28.01.01 (1542 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Instant PC's
Disadvantages: easy to copy the wrong way
How long do you think it would take to rebuild your PC with all those programs, games, patches and drivers if your hard drive spun its last revolution right now? Two hours? Three hours? A day? A week? ........ How about 10 minutes to half an hour, IMPOSSIBLE I hear you cry, he's hallucinating, dreaming, a mad man. No I'm not and I'll tell you how to do it.
What makes this impossible feat do-able is in my opinion the finest utility to hit your friendly local IT Technician between the eyes since the invention of the CD. The software I am wittering on about is Ghost, recently snapped up by Symantec and so renamed Norton Ghost and none the worse for it.
Ghost is basically a piece of backup software, only with a difference. It will make an image of your whole hard drive or partition, which you can use if you need to rebuild your system. Just start you PC using a floppy disk, run ghost and tell it to expand your image on to your drive. This completely replaces the partition with what was on your drive when you backed up, hey presto, instant computer in a matter of minutes. No need to partition, format, install windows, reinstall windows, install drivers, install apps, find drivers that actually work, set up the internet etc etc. Get the picture yet? The real power of Ghost for the individual user lies in it's ability to place images on different sized drives enabling you to very easily upgrade to a larger drive.
Ghost actually comes in three flavours, the personal edition, enterprise edition and Netware edition.
At the core of all the different versions is Ghost itself, a dos program which is remarkably easy and painless to use. When run Ghost gives you the options of imaging your drive to a file, directly to another drive or restoring your drive from an image. When you choose to make an image file you are first given the choice of the source drive or partition. Next you are asked where you want to put the image file, f
or obvious reasons you can't place the image file on the drive you're imaging. Last step is to choose what sort of compression you want - high, fast, none - typically, high will give you roughly 2:1 compression of the actual data on your source drive. Then away you go. Restoring a drive is just the reverse of the backup process, less the compression step.
Personal Edition
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This comes with three utilities, which are Ghost, Ghost explorer and a boot disk creator. Ghost explorer is a windows based utility, which enables you to open an image as you would a zip file and extract any files you need. The boot disk creator will create three different disks, one with usb support, one network and the last with CD support.
Enterprise Edition
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With the arrival of enterprise, Ghost is moving further away from just being a backup solution and more something akin to Zen works or Tivoli, which are remote management solutions. It has utilities to build several PC's at once, even configuring them with different IP addresses.
Netware Edition
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Ghost will quite happily do any partition you throw at it however with non-windows partitions it does a sector by sector copy which means the disk you put the image on will have to be exactly the same. With the Netware edition ghost will allow you to copy Netware partitions to different sized drive.
Conclusion
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As a support technician I can honestly say Ghost has had an enormous impact on my life. I can't recommend it highly enough, incredibly easy to use and turns a whole day of a job into half an hour. If you are getting errors on a system you can immediately rule in or out hardware by using ghost, if the errors persist after ghosting the system it's a hardware problem, i.e. not mine ;-) The only criticism I could lay on it would be that if you have identical drives and are ghosting from one to the o
ther, it can be very easy to ghost the wrong way and replace the good drive with the duff one which has happened to yours truly on more than one occasion (hangs head in shame).
Ghost blows any other form of backup out of the water. If you'll take my advice go and buy it today and sleep soundly at night.
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