Symantec Ghost like ERD Commander maybe will be discontinued due to the support for
imaging being built in to newer MS products... |
This is one of the most innovative software programs I have came across in my
twenty-five plus years as a hardware tech. I really believe the original company that
created this program had their act together. If you need to backup your personal
system, create an image for deployment across an enterprise with thousands of
computers this program will save you countless dollars and many hours in time.
Time is money, no?
For a comprehensive paper on the why and how to
image a system see this
page:
Symantec Ghost usage.
Quote from Symantec web site:
"Key Features:
Back up your digital music, photos, financial documents, and
everything
else on your computer in one easy step.
Recover files or folders quickly, even if your operating system won't start.
Work and play while Norton
Ghost automatically makes backups in the background.
Customize backup schedules, optimize storage media, and make on-demand backups
at the click of a button.
Conserve disk space and time with automatic incremental backups."
Ghost Software, a must for your IT Tool Box!
Or Norton Ghost Drive / Partition Imaging
You can take a new hard drive or SSD and put your backup image on the drive with
Ghost (16 bit) or Ghost32 (32 bit) but first you have to create the partition
that the image will go on.
To create the partition you can use Symantec Ghost, just select the drive then in the
block where Ghost indicates [New Partition] type in the size you want the
partition to be.
One draw back with using Ghost to create the partition is that
the partition is not bootable.
That is you have to make the partition bootable (set as Active) either with the
Windows/Linux/Mac Operating System install disk or with another Operating System
such as DOS, an ERD Commander, or a BartPE disk.
When making a Ghost image of your partitions I suggest you use the "High
Compression" feature instead of the "High Speed" feature. The High Speed feature
will create a file (or series of files) the same size as the partition. However
using High Compression will create a smaller set of files. If the partition you
are going to make an image of is less than 10 GB you may have two or three
smaller 2 GB files and those will fit on a DVD, where as a High Speed set of
files will be anywhere from 10 GB to the full size of the partition.
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When you make your image you should store the files on a device that is not
connected to the computer that the image is on. Such as an external hard drive,
a network share drive, or if the image is small enough on a CD or DVD.
Rating:
I am rating this program with a 10 out of 10, best of the best.
You can not go
wrong with this program. It is not cheap, but neither is your lost productivity.
There are a couple of other programs that do the same thing and I may do a
review of them. I give this program a high rating because it has been in my Tech
software tool box since it was released over two decades ago.
I will point out that the latest version of Ghost (they have remove
Norton from their brand) is more in line with the new Windows 7 imaging process
and you have to do a work around to get to a point where you can make an
stand alone image and not restore points, it is possible but you have to wade
through a lot of 'junk' to do it.
I can not stress enough about having a good, solid backup
of your data.
You will find three sections on Ghost Imaging in
the .
Oct 2013 -
MS and Symantec have announced that the program called Symantec Ghost will be
discontinued and support for existing products will cease Feb 2014, another fine
program killed off by a kludge from MS...
So if you can find it now is the time to get it! Be aware that there are other
fine imaging programs and the fact that this one will no longer be available the
thieves will be using pirate copies to push their viruses.
02/15/14 - I went to Symantec's web site and did a search for "Ghost", it is
gone, you get links to it but the links just come back to the same page ...
By the way ...
Your Windows 7 ERD failing to do what you want it to do? Want to make a custom Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) for yourself? Check this out.
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A Symantec
Ghost
image is
invaluable!
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