Norton Ghost questions

[Branden Wolner]

I just bought Norton Ghost 2003 and the user manual is pretty shitty. I
was hoping I could get some feedback here. So, some quick questions:

1) Is there any reason for running Ghost in the system tray other than
easy of launching?

2) I just performed a backup of my entire harddisk. Only about 4GB so it
only took about 12 minutes. My question is, in future, when I do periodic
backups, is it possible to do "incremental" backups? That is, only backup
up files which are new or have changed? Seems a waste to keep backing up
megabytes of files that never change.

3) Is there an easy way to exclude certain folders/files (ie IE cache)
from being backedup? I realize there is a command line switch "-skip"
which can refer to a text file listing files and folders, but is this the
only way? I don't see a setting in the options.

4) Finally, I wrote the gho file to a FAT32 partition on an external IEEE
harddrive. I did this so I could view/modify the image with Ghost
Explorer. Was this worth it? Would it be better to backup to an NTFS
partition (my system partition on primary HDD is NTFS)? Also, in event of
disaster, can I restore from a FAT32 external HDD partition back to
primary NTFS partition?

Thanks for any and all feedback. If these questions are redundant with
others', I apologize.

 

[Airman Basic]

Go here:
http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_1.htm
and all will be revealed.

 

[Branden Wolner]

Go here:
http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_1.htm
and all will be revealed.

Thanks

 

[IOStorm]

2) I just performed a backup of my entire harddisk. Only about 4GB so it
only took about 12 minutes. My question is, in future, when I do periodic
backups, is it possible to do "incremental" backups? That is, only backup
up files which are new or have changed? Seems a waste to keep backing up
megabytes of files that never change.

Keep in mind that you might want to have a few different backups. If
you are essentially doing an update of an already existing image, you
might be really pissed if the next time you start your system you find
that something has been hosed and you can't get in. Your only image
now has the hosed configuration.

Unless Ghost has started doing true incremental images where you can
pull an image from any number of sessions, yet all identical files are
only saved once. If Symantec has done that, I'm not aware of it.