Drive snapshot software?
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We use Norton Ghost. It works very well, and we use it in two scenarios: First, as a disaster recovery solution on the workstations. We do a standard build, then save a Ghost image, so that we can recover to the point of the image (if eg a service pack toasts the machine). As part of the policy here, no data is ever stored on workstations, so data loss is not an issue. Second, for the test servers, we have lots of builds (NT4 SP1, W2K3 French with no service packs, W2K with SP2 and so on). When we need a particular image, we just use Ghost to restore that image, and run tests.
A question about Ghost - if I want to save an image of a 300GB hard drive will that fit onto another drive of the same capacity or do I need a larger drive? This is if the drive is all one partition but with space. Thanks. The tigress is here :-D
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A question about Ghost - if I want to save an image of a 300GB hard drive will that fit onto another drive of the same capacity or do I need a larger drive? This is if the drive is all one partition but with space. Thanks. The tigress is here :-D
Trollslayer wrote: A question about Ghost - if I want to save an image of a 300GB hard drive will that fit onto another drive of the same capacity or do I need a larger drive? This is if the drive is all one partition but with space. Thanks. depends on how much free space is there. The first versions of Ghost copied a partition image, or all the used and free space was placed in the image. Now the ghost images have a header with all the information regarding the setup of the partition and boot record, its size, block sizes, etc. and then it follows with just the used files. This usually means if the drive is not full you can copy the image to a drive that is the same size as the original with no problems. And when you have to use the image to rebuild a drive, it no longer has to be the same manufacturer and size. Now... if you have completely filled the drive, then this new method actually can take more space depending on the contents. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Hi everyone! I know that all sorts of backup solutions and applications have already been discussed here before, but this time I'm specifically interested in something that will create a snapshort of the whole system partition, so that you can recover your complete OS together with your installed applications in case of disaster. One application recommended by my friend is Drive Snapshot[^], but their website, or the application itself doesn't look very "professional", when compared to Acronis TrueImage[^] for exapmle (same price). But that could by just my personal feeling. Does anyone else have anyexperience with the two? Or can you recommend anything else for the task? Thanks in advance! Rado
Radoslav Bielik http://www.neomyz.com/poll [^] - Get your own web poll http://www.neomyz.com/games [^] - Add a small game to your website -- modified at 6:29 Tuesday 4th October, 2005
Try http://www.partimage.org/[^] its free and it works very well. I also recommend Norton Ghost but since I have many linux machines in my department partimage is a better choice for me as I can send the image from a windows pc to a linux box and store it in compressed image files (I have it split the image to a series of 2GB files) on my network server with only having to take the windows machine down. John
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A question about Ghost - if I want to save an image of a 300GB hard drive will that fit onto another drive of the same capacity or do I need a larger drive? This is if the drive is all one partition but with space. Thanks. The tigress is here :-D
You can enable compression in Ghost. To give you an idea, a 15GB partition here generates 9GB of image files.
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Hi everyone! I know that all sorts of backup solutions and applications have already been discussed here before, but this time I'm specifically interested in something that will create a snapshort of the whole system partition, so that you can recover your complete OS together with your installed applications in case of disaster. One application recommended by my friend is Drive Snapshot[^], but their website, or the application itself doesn't look very "professional", when compared to Acronis TrueImage[^] for exapmle (same price). But that could by just my personal feeling. Does anyone else have anyexperience with the two? Or can you recommend anything else for the task? Thanks in advance! Rado
Radoslav Bielik http://www.neomyz.com/poll [^] - Get your own web poll http://www.neomyz.com/games [^] - Add a small game to your website -- modified at 6:29 Tuesday 4th October, 2005
I have used true image to back up my personnal machines for some time and am reasonably satisfied with it. It can make 'live' imagage (windows running) and can 'update' them with incremental 'change images'. It supports compression and does not store empty regions, so images are almost always smaller than the original. It can split the image into multiple files, allowing recording to CD/DVD for archiving. The bootable restore CD is acually a linux based os, and may have issues with some newer hardware (had some problems with usb on a new dell ws360 crashing the restore OS, but Acronis support was able to provide some boot comman line stuff to disable that on boot, and it worked fine after that). My one complain would be that new versions come out quite frequently (every 6 months or so) and upgrades are not free (although less expensive than first time purchase). One must be quite patient to get support. Also, images made with older versions are not always compatible with the new versions, so keep th old boot CDs. Has nice features like being able to 'mount' an image like a mapped drive and copy individual files, can verify images (just an integrity check, not compare to disk). It is very easy to use, and has been reliable for me so far, although I have an associate who discovered (too late) that all his images were 'bad' somehow...may have been a version mismatch issue, or perhaps a bad hard drive storing the images. Works reasonabley well stroring images over the network, but faster to use an external (USB/Firewire) drive. Can't write directly to CD/DVD and span volumes (need to image to multiple files on some hard drive, then burn those using CD burning software) Hope this helps Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power Eric Hoffer All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke
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Hi everyone! I know that all sorts of backup solutions and applications have already been discussed here before, but this time I'm specifically interested in something that will create a snapshort of the whole system partition, so that you can recover your complete OS together with your installed applications in case of disaster. One application recommended by my friend is Drive Snapshot[^], but their website, or the application itself doesn't look very "professional", when compared to Acronis TrueImage[^] for exapmle (same price). But that could by just my personal feeling. Does anyone else have anyexperience with the two? Or can you recommend anything else for the task? Thanks in advance! Rado
Radoslav Bielik http://www.neomyz.com/poll [^] - Get your own web poll http://www.neomyz.com/games [^] - Add a small game to your website -- modified at 6:29 Tuesday 4th October, 2005
I used true image to upgrade my laptop hard drive. I tried a couple of linux distros, but configuring my drivers and NTFS support took up the hour and a half that I dedicated to trying it out. TrueImage worked great. I backed up to an external USB drive, made a boot CD and restored the backup to my new hard drive and I was up and running in next to no time. I also used it when I attempted an upgrade from XP home to XP pro. Newegg had a good download price when I bought it.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Trollslayer wrote: A question about Ghost - if I want to save an image of a 300GB hard drive will that fit onto another drive of the same capacity or do I need a larger drive? This is if the drive is all one partition but with space. Thanks. depends on how much free space is there. The first versions of Ghost copied a partition image, or all the used and free space was placed in the image. Now the ghost images have a header with all the information regarding the setup of the partition and boot record, its size, block sizes, etc. and then it follows with just the used files. This usually means if the drive is not full you can copy the image to a drive that is the same size as the original with no problems. And when you have to use the image to rebuild a drive, it no longer has to be the same manufacturer and size. Now... if you have completely filled the drive, then this new method actually can take more space depending on the contents. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Thanks Jeff :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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You can enable compression in Ghost. To give you an idea, a 15GB partition here generates 9GB of image files.
Thanks Graham :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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I have used true image to back up my personnal machines for some time and am reasonably satisfied with it. It can make 'live' imagage (windows running) and can 'update' them with incremental 'change images'. It supports compression and does not store empty regions, so images are almost always smaller than the original. It can split the image into multiple files, allowing recording to CD/DVD for archiving. The bootable restore CD is acually a linux based os, and may have issues with some newer hardware (had some problems with usb on a new dell ws360 crashing the restore OS, but Acronis support was able to provide some boot comman line stuff to disable that on boot, and it worked fine after that). My one complain would be that new versions come out quite frequently (every 6 months or so) and upgrades are not free (although less expensive than first time purchase). One must be quite patient to get support. Also, images made with older versions are not always compatible with the new versions, so keep th old boot CDs. Has nice features like being able to 'mount' an image like a mapped drive and copy individual files, can verify images (just an integrity check, not compare to disk). It is very easy to use, and has been reliable for me so far, although I have an associate who discovered (too late) that all his images were 'bad' somehow...may have been a version mismatch issue, or perhaps a bad hard drive storing the images. Works reasonabley well stroring images over the network, but faster to use an external (USB/Firewire) drive. Can't write directly to CD/DVD and span volumes (need to image to multiple files on some hard drive, then burn those using CD burning software) Hope this helps Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power Eric Hoffer All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke
Thanks a lot for your detailed response. We've decided to give it a try, and I think that True Image will be the best choice. We had some issues with the trial version (and are still having) but it worked the best from among other applications we have tried. The documentation is professional, and the program did what it was supposed to do without any major issues - we've created an image on a network folder, booted from the provided recovery cd, and restored the image to another hard drive. The major issue we're still having is that it's refusing to work with our Linux based file server. Whenever the program is started, we're not able to get to the linux (samba) shared folders anymore until restarting the PC. I guess I'll have to test their tech support as well. :) Anyway, thanks for your recommendation!
Radoslav Bielik http://www.neomyz.com/poll [^] - Get your own web poll http://www.neomyz.com/games [^] - Add a small game to your website
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I used true image to upgrade my laptop hard drive. I tried a couple of linux distros, but configuring my drivers and NTFS support took up the hour and a half that I dedicated to trying it out. TrueImage worked great. I backed up to an external USB drive, made a boot CD and restored the backup to my new hard drive and I was up and running in next to no time. I also used it when I attempted an upgrade from XP home to XP pro. Newegg had a good download price when I bought it.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
Andy, thanks for sharing your experience with True Image. :) It looks that it will be the one we'll choose. We've downloaded the trial version and it worked the best from all applications we've tested, though we had some minor issues. Thanks again!
Radoslav Bielik http://www.neomyz.com/poll [^] - Get your own web poll http://www.neomyz.com/games [^] - Add a small game to your website