[Ham-Computers] RE: Backup OS -- Thanks

[Hsu, Aaron]

Hi Rolly,

Funny...I was just about to e-mail you to see how everything was going and I read your recent post on the reflector.

Symantec's GHOST is a GREAT program.  It's widely used and very simple.  With GHOST, you can backup a drive as an image (aka create a single, LARGE "image" file of all the files on your HD), backup a partition as an image (creates an image file of just one HD partition, or clone a drive (drive to drive copy).  If you really want to, you can even do a "forensic" image or copy (true sector-by-sector).  Luckily, by default, GHOST only does file-by-file copies - otherwise, we'd be waiting forever to copy those new 120GB drives!  You can image via drive to drive, drive to network drive/share, or via parallel ports (and I think the newest versions support USB to USB).  You can even GHOST different drive sizes - GHOST will warn you if the destination drive is smaller.  As long as the amount of actual data is less than the destination capacity, this won't be a problem.

Using GHOST is easy.  Start GHOST, select Local --> Disk/Partition --> To/From Disk/Image.  Then select the source and destination, whether or not to compress the image  (if creating an image) and that's it.  GHOST does the rest.

There are more advanced options which are not available via the GUI.  You invoke these options via a command line option when starting GHOST.  For example, the "-Zx" parameter specifies the amount of compression where "x" is a number from 0 to 9, 9 being highest.  In the GUI, the "fast" compression is eqivalent to "-Z1" and the "high" compression is equivalent to "-Z2".  As you can see, the command line option allows several "higher" compression settings.  One of my favorite options is "-SPLIT=x".  This tells GHOST to create image files no larger than "x" MB's.  I usually use "-SPLIT=640 -AUTO" to have GHOST split the HD backup image into 640MB "chunks" that I can fit onto CD-R's.  The "-AUTO" just tells GHOST not to prompt me for certain things.  To get a list of all the command line options available in GHOST, just type "GHOST -?" and it will show you.

Rolly, for what you want to accomplish (creating a mirror image backup), you would just have GHOST do a Drive to Drive copy.  When it's done, both drives will be bootable and will be identical as far as the OS is concerned (remember, it's not a sector-by-sector copy, so it's not physically identical unless you told GHOST to work in forensic mode).

Currently, there are several different "flavors" of GHOST.  The "Personal Edition" is for home use and is what you want to get.  If I remember correctly, you have Norton's SystemWorks - if it's the "Professional" version, then you have GHOST P.E. (it's part of the NSW Pro).  If not, then run down to the local BestBuy/CompUSA/what-have-you and pick up a copy.  The other GHOST flavors are for small business and enterprise customers.

73,

  - Aaron, NN6O


-----Original Message-----
From: Rolly (W7DGX) and Sandra Goodspeed [mailto:rollyg@earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 12:53 PM
To: ham computer Reflector
Subject: [Ham-Computers] Backup OS -- Thanks


Backup OS on CD

Thanks all for the response. So far the results are unanimous for Ghost.

How does one transfer from one hard drive to the other. Can one be a
master and the other a slave on the same hard drive interface?

This program interests me. I shall look into it more. Sounds like
exactly what I want.

I had one hard drive fail. I bought another and tried to reload all my
software. The major problem was getting the U.S. Robotics modem to
install. Thanks to Aaron Hsu and his patience it was finally installed.

The old hard drive was under warrantee, and was replaced. I now call it
the new hard drive. Again, in spite of following rather detailed
instructions that was used before, I cannot get the U.S. Robotics modem
to install.

So I have two hard drives that I would like to be identical. Since I
cannot get the modem to install on the new hard drive, I was looking for
an alternative method to get the complete system installed.

My goal is to have the two drives be mirror images so if any drive
failure occurs, I can recover faster. Hopefully the data on the other
drive would only be a few days old.

Again, thanks to all for your responses. Now does anybody know of a
mirroring program?

        Rolly W7DGX