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LAN Party Forums => Support Group => Started by: Xiphias on March 23, 2006, 07:56:59 PM
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I've personally never done it but i've heard it's great if you have space or extra hard drive. Well i've got load's of extra hard drives, so I was wondering is it really worth it? Also whats the best ghosting program out there or newest out there? I got Norton Ghost v10 around here some where cause my dad uses it, but I really don't listen to him.
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I ghost after a new install... and I always use Symantec Ghost
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Symantec is the company that makes Norton products if i'm not mistaken.
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Symantic bought norton awhile ago
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It is SO worth it. Like pride said, after a fresh install (and I include all games, patched, etc) I ghosted. Since then, I have reapplied the image 3 times. Makes it easy to get back very close to a full operational stand point (things lacking would be any recent patches).
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If you do have Ghost 10, then you are in really good shape. Ghost 10 is the latest of Symantec's consumer imaging software. The latest version of the corporate version of ghost is 8.2. Go figure? There used to be a serious competitor to Ghost but Symantec bought them a while back. I've played with other imaging software and I still like Ghost the best. MS is currently working on a imaging software themselves, but unlike Ghost, is strictly a command line utility and requires a bootable Win PE CD or a another computer. MS's imaging tool is also still in beta and won't be released for a couple more months at the earliest.
Ghost 10 will allow you to setup scheduled backups and will take the snapshots *while_windows_is_running*. You don't have to do this and can use the included Ghost 2003 bootable CD to image your partition or whole disk to an image file. Ghost 10 uses a different file extension for its image file than does the Ghost 2003 CD.
Either way, VERY worth it. If you schedule regular backups or manually do them yourself and you suffer software or hardware failure. You are only ~30 minutes (give or take depending on amount of data) away from being back up and running again.
Regular backups are key. If a month or two goes by and you haven't made a fresh image, some people will rather start from scratch with freshly updated drivers than go through the hassle of updating a several month old system.
~nstuff
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Just because I'm a tease....
Vista includes this imaging feature that nstuff is talking about. MS calls it "Block Level Backup" and it worked just as advertised. I ran a complete backup of my Vista partition across the network to another machine while Windows was running. Very convenient and this may (may) lead to people actually doing backups......naaaahhhh.
Now only if they could get Vista out the door *sigh*
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I think you are talking about the new image backup feature in MS Backup within Vista. Actually, the app i'm talking about is currently called ximage. It's strictly command line but my guess is the technology used in ximage and what is included in Vista are more than likely very similar.
One cool thing about ximage vs ghost is that ximage will index multiple copies of the same file and it supports multiple partitions or disc images in a single ximage file. Since two or more files that are the same doesn't take up any more room than just one copy of that file, an ximage file with two complete systems may only increase a few hundred meg as it will only be capturing the differences between the two systems and indexing the multiple copies of the same files and where they belong. Hope that makes sense. ximage is still in beta and may change its name do to some reasons i can't get into.
Either way, free is always good and and built-in imaging backup features in Vista will be very nice. If for no other reason than to help get your neighbor to do regular backups. :)
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The one thing about he latest Symantec, ever since they went away from the DOS based system, is making an image of partition that is actively loaded and running. It just scares the bejesus out of me, but I have to say, the image has worked flawlessly. The company you were speaking of was Powerquest I do believe, Driveimage was the product.
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yep yep. Never actually used DriveImage myself, but before Powerquest was bought, several people i knew swore by it. I think the ability to image a computer while running in Ghost 10 came from drive image.