How does Norton Ghost work?

Kingsd316

Hi all,

At work we are all about to be given a copy of Norton Ghost to back up our HDD drives incase of system failure, can someone explain how it works, ive been reading the website saying it can restore you PC/Laptop even if the Operating system fails to load, how does it all work, do you put the back up on some kind of CD or USB stick and boot from that?

(im just interested as im thinking of using it on my home laptop to as i have hundreds of photos on it)

Thanks -

nickmack

Kingsd316 wrote: »

Hi all,

At work we are all about to be given a copy of Norton Ghost to back up our HDD drives incase of system failure, can someone explain how it works, ive been reading the website saying it can restore you PC/Laptop even if the Operating system fails to load, how does it all work, do you put the back up on some kind of CD or USB stick and boot from that?

(im just interested as im thinking of using it on my home laptop to as i have hundreds of photos on it)

Basically, it creates a 'clone' or 'image' of a source partition or disk, which can be stored on another partition/disk/removable media. You need sufficient space on the destination to store all of the data on the partition/disc.

Ghost is usually run from a bootable floppy or CD, you can specify the location of the backup image and if needed the recovery image. Hard disks present in the machine should be available but if this you want to use USB or DVD, you will need the appropriate drivers loaded to see these devices.

In the event something happens with your hard disc data or operating system, you can restore this saved image and resume from the point the image was made.

I use it often for test machines and reverting back to an initial configuration. For just backing up your photos, it may be better to use an automated online backup service.

jbreckmckye

Effectively, ghosting programs create a 'shadow' of the drive, including partition table data, filetable lookups etc. This archive is then split up across discs, and 'wrapped'. The first section will be 'wrapped' in a bootable layer, that probably uses some BSD-license OS... like BSD. The other portions probably contain header data for the recovery system.

An educated guess, anyway.

aerostar

You should never repeat never keep your photographs/data etc solely on your computer, anything mechanical will fail at some time, you should make copies onto cd or dvds, you see many times on MSE cries for help on this board, because either the disc has failed or the user has deleted their precious data by mistake, and not had any backups.

If your laptop has lots of data and photographs, then you would need multiple DVDs for the backup. EG you have used 100gig out of your 360gb drive, even with compression the backup size would be around 70gb, dvds hold 4gb so you would need around 20 dvds !. Photographs do not compress if they are JPGs as this is already a compressed format.

A solution would be to have an external hard disc (do not drop it !) and back up to that and keep your data on laptop, or use an online storage facility, but none are 100% guaranteed. CDs/DVDs will also deteriorate in time as well.

Your backups should also be kept away from your home or office, if you had a fire or burglary, then both could go. Keep your home backups at the office and office backups at home.

I am surprised that your work place does not automatically backup their systems/data, without having to resort to users having to do it.

tronator

aerostar wrote: »

... you should make copies onto cd or dvds,...

... CDs/DVDs will also deteriorate in time as well.

I would not advice making backups onto CDs and DVDs, especially if you go the money saving route when buying them.