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I went ahead and purchased it anyway. So far it seems to be a very nice program, but I really need to read the PDF file to figure out what I'm doing. A little too early for me to uninstall my old program especially since I had to use it to transfer the included ISO file over to a disc for an emergency restore disc. It doesn't seem to do a file-by-file transfer as did my old program, but I guess I can live with that as long as it backs up and I can restore.
I still don't understand the recovery points bit though. It sounds a little like the recovery thing in Windows XP which, by the way, never worked for me. I always got an error with that. I also would like to backup to DVDs, but the program seems to not prefer or allow this. Backing up to the hard drive is a little stupid in my opinion. Isn't the reason for backing up a hard drive is to save it from hardware failure? The first to go is usually the hard drive, not the DVD drive although the latter can fail too, but the disc will still exist. I don't understand this reasoning at all. However, I think I saw something about copying/moving the backup from the hard drive to CD/DVD. Still, backing up to a CD/DVD should be an option.
Recovery points are just backup images made at designated times to which you can restore your system when needed. Ghost can do periodic full backup recovery points or periodic recovery point sets, each composed of a complete baseline image followed over time by a series of smaller incremental recovery points. Recovery from the incremental points then depends on each of the preceding incremental points added to the baseline image.
I choose to do my backups to seperate internal or USB external hard drives. They're much faster than DVD drives. Also, at standard compression, my baseline images now are somewhere north of 15 GB each, which would require multiple DVDs and much time. If you want added insurance, the backups files can be copied to a second hard drive or you can use a Raid 1 array (two drives in parrallel) as a backup destination.
-- Jim
I realize that it would take multiple DVDs or DVD-DLs, but isn't the point of backing up to avoid hard drive crashes. Backing up to a USB or internal hard drive wouldn't be my first option since I've had a few crash on me before. I know it is faster than DVD drives so I would prefer to backup to the hard drive as a temporary measure, but then copy the files over to DVD. The only problem would be splitting the files up. However, I have been thinking for a long time about getting a separate drive (probably not USB unless I get something better than the two I had before that both crashed) just for backups. The idea of being able to restore my entire system is more appealing than having to do reformats and reinstalls several times a year.
The point is preservation of working system information over its useful lifetime, and the main principal here is redundancy. To reduce the risk of data loss (via disk failure and other causes) and the added work and lost time of reconstituting a failed system, one always keeps recoverable system information (and particularly the unique data) in two or more independent locations - e.g., the system and a backup drive. That way, if one fails, the information exists or can be retrieved from the other while the failure is corrected. Risk is always a matter of degree and the tradeoffs involved. (Even DVDs are not risk free.) Unless something of a general castrophy happens, there's little chance that two independent hard drives (much less three or more) will fail at the same time, thus allowing the failed drive to be replaced and reconstituted while the information remains recoverable on the other(s) DVDs may be less physically failure-prone than spinning hard drives, but the tradeoff costs are the significant extra time and a relentlessly increasing inventory of old backup disks that you may not want to release to the general public. (Have you ever tried to dispose of three years worth of old backup CDs?). DVDs are more suited for mid-to-long term data archiving, as opposed to shorter term backing-up requirements. (I keep only two weeks of running Ghost recovery point sets at any time.) With hard drives becoming progressively less expensive (and more reliable) per Byte stored, it really pays to play the real-time redundancy game with fast multiple independent hard drives for the short term backup requirements.
-- Jim
I know about three (or more) years of disposing of CDs. I did that a few years ago and rebacking up the information to DVDs was a monumental project.
As you said, the chances of two or more hard drives failing at once is probably unlikely.
I'll add an "amen" the the CD/DVD backup process being exensive and problematic
I have three external USB drives on three systems. From time to time I switch them so that I can keep a full backup of each system on each of them. All of that may not be necessary but I have had crashes, at the worst possible moment, and I've learned that I've never had too many backups or been too safe when it comes to keeping duplicate copies of very important data.
**bleep**
I'm in the market for a new backup program since my very old version of Roxio's Easy Media Creator (EMC) is conflicting with Norton 360 v2. Looking at the product page, I can't tell if I can backup specific files uncompressed or do they have to be compressed into one file for restore. With Roxio's EMC Creator Classic I choose specific folders and/or files to backup so if I need to restore I can do that for individual files. I don't like having to backup in a compressed format and using the backup program to restore.
Many years ago I remember having a program from Symantec/Norton called Norton Backup. I believe it was a DOS program so you know this was a long time ago. Is Ghost the new Norton Backup? I have an old version of Norton Ghost that came with an external hard drive I purchased several years ago. I never used it so I really have no idea about Norton Ghost other than you can backup your entire system which appeals to me since I'm tired of reformats and reinstalls.
Does it restore from DOS and if so how would this be done when my system only restores within Windows XP, reboots, then installs all of the crap that came with my computer (5 years old). Windows XP only has the DOS window within Windows.
Hehe - I'm sitting on both sides of the fence on this one.
I agree about having multiple backup locations. Our household uses laptops with limited drive space on each and I've had three catastrophic external USB drive failures in the last year. This seems really high to me. At first I thought it was a Vista issue since the problem has only occured when using a Vista laptop. (and I'm very careful about moving and disconnecting drives). But I'm not really sure of the cause.
So more is definitely better... but I also really don't trust USB drives at this point. I wish it were faster to back up all of my digital photos and music to DVD. It really is a pain, but will likely become part of my process for the really important stuff for a while.
RR
robertreynolds wrote:Hehe - I'm sitting on both sides of the fence on this one.
I agree about having multiple backup locations. Our household uses laptops with limited drive space on each and I've had three catastrophic external USB drive failures in the last year. This seems really high to me. At first I thought it was a Vista issue since the problem has only occured when using a Vista laptop. (and I'm very careful about moving and disconnecting drives). But I'm not really sure of the cause.
So more is definitely better... but I also really don't trust USB drives at this point. I wish it were faster to back up all of my digital photos and music to DVD. It really is a pain, but will likely become part of my process for the really important stuff for a while.
RR
That's interesting. I'd be surprised if Vista had much to do with the failures, but I could be wrong. On the other hand, I'm running XP, and, so far (knock on wood), none of my USB drives has failed. I'm curious if it has anything to do with the manufacturers. Two of my external backup secondaries USBs are by Seagate and the third is a Western Digital portable. My desktop backup primary is an internal Seagate with Smart Drive monitoring.
When it comes to the photos, are you backing them up to DVD or offloading them (archiving) for long term storage and retrieval? If it's the latter, DVDs are apropriate as long as you can incrementally add to their content as new material appears. I keep my photos organized in event or subject named folders, and when I edit the images, they get renamed and added to the folders to keep with the originals. I do copy the older ones to DVDs set to increment until filled. But with the current images, it's easier to offload and work with them from the (redundant) external hard drives.
-- Jim
Through 2003, Ghost was a DOS based program for backing up and restoring entire disks or partitions using images. It would back up from the installed Windows program, but required booting from a DOS based disk to do the restore by overwriting the disk or partition with the selected image. It also was possible to use the images to recover specific files using a special image browser. Later versions (currently Ghost 14) have been Windows based, where, like the DOS versions, it backs up (creates images called recovery points) from the Windows installation, but then requires booting from a special Windows based recovery disk or an equivalent specially installed hard drive partition to overwrite disks or partitions and recover from the selected images. Three different lavels of image compression are available, with trade-offs between image size (storage space) and time to backup and restore. Ghost 14 also will perform selected file/folder backups/restore using a proprietary storage format. It also has an image browser through which you can examine and recover selected files or folders from your recovery points.
I'm currently using Ghost 14 and am very happy with it. It and its predicessors have bailed me out of some nasty situations.
-- Jim