Ghost

  • Thread starter Thread starter Justin Case
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Justin Case

This may sound like a dumb question, but the programs that make a ghost
image of a hard drive's contents--does this mean that all the contents of a
drive are copied, or just the operating system's crucial files? Thanks.
If one has a 20 GB drive, is the ghost image also 20 GB?
 
you get all files, but you can also choolse which files i think.

No, the images is just the size of the data, not the size of the drive.

So if your data is 7 gig you can put that on a target drive of 20 gig, or 40
gig the extra space is just extra space.
 
Justin, programs like ghost, drive image, etc create an exact image of
everything on that drive. That image can then be restored to a completely
empty disk and when you finish you are exactly where you were when you
created the image, every program, every file, every setting. I can't speak
for ghost but Drive Image, if you choose the option compresses about 50%, so
if you 20 gig disk was full you would have a 10 gig image. But if you only
had 12 gig of space used then the image would be about 6 gig.
Get a 2nd hard drive, backup your data to it often and when any major
program changes are made make an image and your always protected.
 
This may sound like a dumb question, but the programs that make a ghost
image of a hard drive's contents--does this mean that all the contents of a
drive are copied, or just the operating system's crucial files? Thanks.
If one has a 20 GB drive, is the ghost image also 20 GB?
Click to expand...

Of course it does not sound dumb, at least not on my computer, where I
have to _read_ your message, not listen to it....


Norton actually sells a program by the name of "Ghost xxx", but it, like
Drive Image and others, creates a complete image of everything that is
on your computer, save perhaps the dust on the monitor screen.

Would the image be 20 megs? No, these programs use compression
techniques. Drive Image 7, for example, recommends 40%, but offers 45%
and 50%. Of course, the image is not going to be of any empty space on
the hard disk, so a backup of a 20GB disk would not likely be 10GB at
50% compression.
 
Actually, there is an option in Ghost to even include "empty space" in
the image, and there are situations where this is necessary, for example
it's the only way to move a system with this year's TurboTax and still
have TurboTax worked (they used a copy protection / product activation
scheme that puts data in unused reserved sectors). This feature is also
used in forensic (police and law enforcement) work as it preserves data
that was in files that had been erased.
 
| This may sound like a dumb question, but the programs that make a ghost
| image of a hard drive's contents--does this mean that all the contents of a
| drive are copied, or just the operating system's crucial files? Thanks.
| If one has a 20 GB drive, is the ghost image also 20 GB?

Norton Ghost can be set to copy an entire drive or just one partition on that
drive. It compresses files depending on the types of files involved. If files
are already substantially compressed, Ghost won't tend to compress them much
more. The partition I store my MP3 files on currently has 26.6GB of data. The
recent Ghost image of that partition is 22.2GB. Of course, MP3s are already
rather highly compressed.

If targeted to a hard drive, the Ghost image is broken up into 2GB chunks plus a
smaller final chunk. When I Ghosted my laptop hard drive to CD, chunk size
defaulted to 702MB on each 700MB CD-R except the last one.

Larc



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