Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (
More info?)
Phred <ppnerkDELETETHIS@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:c5oq2n$48iuc$4@ID-151056.news.uni-berlin.de...
> Rod Speed <rod_speed@yahoo.com> wrote
>> RB <rbaulbin@hotmail.com> wrote
>>> Wondered if anyone could tell me if there's some means of
>>> making a complete nightly image of a drive, so that in the
>>> event of a crash on the main drive, the backup is ready to go,
>>> with absolutely no need for application installation, drivers, etc?
>> Yep, any of the decent imaging apps will do that.
>> That includes Ghost, Drive Image, True Image, etc etc etc.
> Rod, have you seen a credible review of these 3 anywhere?
Dont bother with those, I just use them instead.
> Which would you recommend?
Depends on the circumstances.
Ghost as part of SystemWorks Pro 2003 is amazingly cheap off ebay.
The user interface isnt as good as with Drive Image, but there is one
hell of a difference in price thats hard to relate to the undoubtedly
rather minor advantage Drive Image has in the user interface.
If you want to image over your lan, its makes a big difference
whether the NIC is natively supported by the imaging program.
Its not that hard to add one that isnt supported with Drive Image.
It can be a real challenge with Ghost unless you know what you
are doing. But you can just use a universal lan boot disk instead.
PowerQuest has just been absorbed by Symantec
and it remains to be seen what that will produce.
There are also some other products like V2i Protector which go
a lot further than those more basic imaging apps, basically allowing
everything to be done that the Win level rather than the much cruder
approach that Ghost 2003 uses, doing all the word at the dos level.
And having incremental backup available. True Image does too.
True Image is a rather less mature product and uses Linux for
its restore boot particularly, and that can have some downsides
with hardware thats a bit unusual. I personally prefer the app to
do everything at the Win level, because you must have got the
hardware working at the Win level with most working systems.
You cant get that as cheaply as with Ghost 2003 tho.
> Whatever you already have, or is there some
> indispensible advantage of one or the other?
Yeah, if you're using the modern approach of an external
removable drive with a firewire or USB2 interface as the
location of the image files, that affects your choice. Same
with the lan. I backup the less intensively used systems
like the PC in the kitchen over the lan and the ease of
setting that up varys quite a bit. You need to be quite
a bit more than the average user to use Ghost 2003
in that situation if the NIC isnt natively supported and
you dont want to bother with a boot CD or floppy.
> (Speaking of which, did you know that
> cemetries are full of indispensible people? ;-)
And quite a few who have been dispensed with |-)
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