J. S. Pack said:
You're right about that.
But also consider this:
Ghost 9.0 has a problem in that you can't create an image (in the
new drive image format) by booting from the recovery CD. All you can do is
recover. Hence you always have to create the image from within the Windows
environment. Normally that's a good thing, but there can be cases when you
don't want to do that. For example, I once made a backup using Acronis
from
within Windows while a real-time data acquistion program was running and
it
ended up corrupted. (I had thought it would. Some things are too good to
be
true.) Acronis, however, provides you w/ a bootable recovery CD from which
you can also backup. With Ghost, you have to switch to the old command
environment Ghost (less convenient than a full GUI, but much more flexible
w/ exclusions, etc.) and hence the old file format. That's not so bad, but
(I think) you can't later increment that image if you wish.
J. S.
I'm not certain I completely understand the import of your comments, so
forgive me if in my response I don't precisely address them. But allow me to
make the following points...
1. In the context of this discussion -- I, and my clients, are interested in
one thing, and one thing only -- to maintain a failsafe or near-failsafe
backup system of our day-to-day working drives. Nothing else. And we hope to
do so in as simple a way possible and consuming as little time as possible
in backing up and restoring data.
2. By & large we find that we achieve this objective by using a disk imaging
program such as Ghost, to *directly* clone the contents of one hard drive to
another. By so doing, we create, for all practical purposes, a bit-for-bit
copy of our working drive(s). We ordinarily do not create disk images on
media such as CD/DVDs. Our primary interest is disk-to-disk clones and not
incremental backups.
3. In carrying out this objective, most of us use a Ghost bootable floppy
disk or Ghost bootable CD to perform the clone. It's simple, it's reasonably
quick, and most of all -- it's effective. Some of us prefer to use Ghost's
Windows interface to perform the cloning operation. I do not. I prefer to
carry out the cloning operation using the Ghost bootable floppy or bootable
CD for its portability aspects and its simplicity. It's simply my personal
preference.
4. We encourage our users to equip their desktop computers with two
removable hard drives. For a variety of reasons, this hardware arrangement
is, for many, if not most PC users, an ideal one for the flexibility it
provides, especially as it relates to easily maintaining a backup system
involving the disk imaging process I've described. The additional cost
involved in so equipping one's PC with this hardware configuration, while
not trifling, is well within the reach of most users I would think. And the
benefits derived from this arrangement are considerable indeed.
5. For one reason or another, many users prefer to use a second internal
hard drive or (preferably) a external hard drive as the backup drive that
receives the cloned contents of the working drive. While we much prefer that
our users employ the two removable drives arrangement noted above, the Ghost
(or Acronis) cloning process will work with this arrangement.
So, to summarize. Our needs are quite basic. We're solely interested in
backing up and (when necessary) restoring the complete contents of our
day-to-day working drive(s). We want to achieve this objective simply &
effectively. We find we can do so using the disk-to-disk cloning method as
described above.
Anna
