Re: Norton Ghost 9.0
From: Peter Wilkins (wilkinsp_nospam_at_ozemail.com.au)
Date: 12/14/04
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Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:38:59 +1100
On 13 Dec 2004 08:18:18 -0600, Mike <MikeV05@privacy.net> wrote :
>It is a bit confusing, but your posts are very helpful. I appreciate you
>taking the time to explain and repeat yourself. Your experience and approach
>are making a lot of sense.
No problem!
>One more dumb question ... If a blue screen occurs,
>you have a full system back up on the external drive. Would you then boot up
>with a ghost cd, and rebuild your primary HD with the image captured on the
>external drive? Then reboot from the recovered image on the primary HD and
>restore the data from your backups on internal HD2? This using Ghost 2003 for
>everything.
>
Yes, that's just about it! Actually if I get a system failure, I can
boot from a number of different sources before applying the image: a
Ghost recovery floppy with Ghost on it, a bootable Ghost Image DVD/CD,
the Ghost installation CD itself, or even an external HDD. I also
have the Ghost images stored in different locations - on DVD, separate
internal or external HDD, or on a network drive, at various different
dates. The image I use to restore will usually be the latest one,
obviously, but there can be times and reasons you might want to
restore to a particular date instead.
1. From DVD (or CD) I just put the first DVD of a Ghost bootable DVD
image set into the drive, turn on the computer and during bootup tell
it to boot from the DVD. That boots the computer into DOS Ghost, so I
can run the restore from the image files on the DVD. That replaces
everything on the boot drive (C:):- system O/S, settings and data,
with the detail from the image. I can then reboot the computer and it
is restored exactly to what it was when I took the backup image. But
that only restores data up to the date that I took the image. So then
I run a separate restore using another data backup program to update
the data from the time of the Ghost image backup to the current date.
Of course, I will lose any data that was created since the last data
backup - hence my motto, backup, backup, backup! The data backup can
be a complete backup of everything in MyDocs, or you can do a complete
backup then daily incremental backups - quicker to make, but then you
have to restore each incremental backup in order, so slower to
restore. You may also need to make special arrangements to backup
some system and program settings that don't go into MyDocs - eg
Outlook contacts lists and emails.
2. Or if I don't have a bootable DVD based image handy, I can boot
into DOS Ghost from a Ghost boot floppy (you can create one from
within Ghost) using my plug-in USB floppy drive, or using my DVD drive
and the Ghost CD, then search for image files on my second HDD (was
internal, now external USB2/firewire) or anywhere else they are stored
that can be accessed by Ghost (even over a network), then run the
restore, then update from the separate data backup as explained for
the DVD restore above. I understand that it is also possible to make
the external HDD bootable, but I haven't tried that yet.
Note if you can boot into Windows on your computer, you can restore
individual files or folders from the Ghost Image using Ghost Explorer
from within Windows. However, don't try to do that from a DVD or CD
image backup directly - it needs many disk swaps and will take
forever. Copy all the .gho and .ghs image files into the one folder
on a HDD first. (I once had to restore a few files from a Ghost CD
image set of 14 CD's - after some hundred or so disk swaps and several
hours the penny dropped, and I copied the whole image set onto the HDD
and restored the files from there in a few minutes.)
Note also that other people use different backup techniques
appropriate to their needs - Art for example uses the disk clone
technique rather than imaging. Each technique has it's own
advantages, you need to suck it and see which meets your needs most
closely. Cloning is quicker, but takes more space: you need a backup
source with the same or more capacity than the drive being cloned.
Imaging can use various stages of compression - the higher the slower
- eg I backup 22G from an 80G C: into a 12G image file which needs
only 3 DVD's. The compression you can get depends on the type and mix
of data you have - txt and bmp and doc files compress a lot more than
already compressed jpg files.
Even when creating an image directly to HDD, I always split it into
DVD sized chunks, so that I can burn a copy to DVD later if I need to.
I think you can resize chunks from within Ghost Explorer but it's
easier and quicker to do it at the start using command line commands.
That's all pretty jumbled but I hope not too confusing!
And remember that all my comments relate to Ghost 2003 - I haven't
used Ghost 9 so don't know all it's capabilities.
And I can't guarantee that my techniques will always work - I haven't
tried restore enough to be sure. I have made hundreds and hundreds of
Ghost image backups, on HDD, CD and DVD, and only once have I had a
problem, and that was due to a faulty CD, but in 20 years of personal
computing I have only had to do a full system restore three times.
They were all successful, but I did lose a couple of days data each
time as I had failed to take a daily backup. I did learn - that's now
automated.
>Gotta order me a Dell external drive.
You can get external USB2/firewire drives incl backup software from
Maxtor and Iomega which are competitive with Dell. I recommend the
Maxtor OneTouch Series II. And don't skimp on the size - it's amazing
how quickly drives fill up! I would recommend at least a 120G, but if
you can afford the extra, a 250G or more.
>
>Thanks again.
de nada
-- Regards, Peter Wilkins
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