While I really like the cloning and recovery point features of Ghost, I find its file backup feature completely useless. This makes me wonder if people are actually using it and how they find it useful - I would like to know in what way they are using it.
I wish the backup feature worked in the same way as recovery point does but for selected folders instead of hard drives. So I can brows the backups in the same folder structure as the original instead of making slow agonizing searches everytime I need something.
I tried the File and Folder function just to see how it worked and I see no reason to use it. For me it is redundant since I use Ghost for imaging my hard drives. I run an incremental back up everyday and start a new set monthly. If you run incremental backups you will have multiple versions of files that get changed. You can set up multiple increments per day if you need to. The Ghost Recovery Point Browser has a Windows Explorer like interface that is easy to work with. You can also mount the image as a drive letter so you can browse your files and folders with Windows Explorer.
Yeah, I guess most people use it like you said. Imaging hard drives is great but I also wish for a similar solution that can work only for selected folders to create a recovery point that I can browse in the same way I browse the hard drive image recovery points. Sometimes for things like reorganizing hard drives content I just need to copy and paste data on another hard drive to stay temporarily there but I don't want to loose the creation date of the original files. Imaging the whole hard drive just for this when I don't really need it is overkill.
Yes it does. Recovered files from both, recovery points and files and folders backup preserve the creation date and all other file info. I checked that during the evaluation and double checked it just now. It was one of the major selling points for me
Have been using Ghost for a while but need more disk space. I have been doing both the image and documents backup and think I do not really need the documents. If I delete the Task, can I just then delete all the files? Once I got into trouble with another version of Ghost by just deleting image files outside of the interface. I assume you just delete the files in \Ghost\File Backup Data??? Thanks
jerryyyyy, I am a new user too and from the short experience with Ghost I found out that the proper way of deleting backup files created with the Backup Files and Folders feature, is to open Recover My Files window and in the search field type the name of the files to be deleted. If the search is with the field blank, Ghost will list all backup files. Then select the files to be deleted, right click anywhere on the selection and choose Delete. This will delete the actual backup files and their entries in Ghost search database. If you use Remove in the Run or Manage backup window this will delete the backup job task item but not the files and not the files entries from the search database. And if you delete the backup files outside Ghost their backup job task and entries in the search database remains which makes mess.
In my experience the files and folders backup feature is adequate only for copying small amount of files from one place to another allowing to preserve the creation dates and all file info but for larger amount of files it becomes extremely slow and thus useless.
Check the other thread I started for details about my experience with trying to backup larger amount of files.
Please allow me to chime in if I may. You might want to take a look at this post where I have outlined the differences between file and folder backups vs Image backups and the pros and cons of each type.
While file and folder preserves the file dates so does recovery from an image backup (recovery point browser). If you mount the recovery point and do a copy/paste from Windows Explorer, the creation date resets to the current date/time but the last modify date is preserved.
In the end, recovering files from an image backup is far, far easier than doing so from a file and folder backup. Most importantly if you want to be able to restore your system drive in the event the hard drive crashes or something without having to reinstall your OS and applications, an image backup is the only thing which will provide this level of protection.
Many folks do both an image backup and a file and folder backup even for the system drive, but this is not necessary. For any drive in which you do image backups, file and folder backups are not necessary and only create redundancy.
Personally I find file and folder backups 100% useless and do image backups on all my drives. This provides 100% protection against any eventuality.
I used to test file and folder backup utilities from companies who claimed they were disaster recovery compliant. E.g, claimed their software could recover your system drive in the event of a disastet without having to reinstall your OS and applications. If you ever hear this claim it is false. One such company went out of business because their software did not live up to that promise.
