Talk:Ghost (software)
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Is there a free software equivalent of the Ghost? -- Toytoy 10:33, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
- There are many competitors to Ghost, but as far as I know there's nothing with a similar level of features which is free.
- Many of the free programs calling themselves Ghost competitors are simple sector copiers. This approach has two disadvantages: it's much slower, because these programs copy every sector on the drive, even those which are not used (and as part of this disadvantage, the image sizes are much larger), and it isn't possible to resize partitions on the destination drive (or copy to a smaller drive). On the bonus side, copying in this fashion works with any filesystem, not just a list of supported filesystems. Ghost drops to this mode for filesystems it doesn't understand, such as HPFS or JFS. An example of this type of program would be g4u. I've never run it, I have no idea how well it might work.
- In a quick google search, I also found Partition Saving which appears to copy FAT and NTFS filesystems intelligently. Again, I've never run this program, I have no idea how well it might work.
- If all you want to do is copy your home pc, and time is worth less to you than money, these programs may well do what you want. If you are a business, you may find that the multicasting, post-cloning, tape and CD/DVD writing features of professional programs are worth the money. Look at the article on disk cloning for more information on what a (professional) disk cloning program actually does.
- Hope this helps.-gadfium 18:23, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- FYI, PartImage copies used parts only. I suspect it was like that from before 2005. --KJ 17:34, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
This is one thing that I still do not know why. Backup is a vital and ancient need. There are so many people working for open/free software, so few are in this particular area. I mean file systems are not rocket science. It must be easier than developing an Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office equivalent. I do believe that open/free software is typically diversified. You may usually find a project, however incomplete, for each particular job that's not too weird. -- Toytoy 01:51, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] OS/2 support
I've removed the following paragraph:
- Norton Ghost was never properly enabled to correctly copy drives created with IBM OS/2 operating system because it lacked an understanding of the unique extended attributes used in OS/2 filesystems. It also lacked support for the HPFS filesystem. PowerQuest DriveImage up to 3.0 and Partition Magic 4.0 contained the most support for OS/2.
because it isn't accurate. Ghost supported extended attributes on FAT filesystems created by OS/2 from its early versions onwards, and I don't believe that support was ever removed. It never supported HPFS filesystems other than by doing a sector-based copy of the filesystem. It may well be true that the other programs listed had better support for HPFS, but that's not relevant in this article.-gadfium 23:30, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] restore snapshots
I (well, my father...) got a new computer from Dell that includes a demo version of Ghost. According to their intro video, it takes periodic snapshots of the current disk state and saves them to disk (on this dell, to a d: partition). Does anyone have information on this feature, and if so, can they add info about it to the article? --Phantom784 02:13, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] 7.5 and NTFS
Ghost 7.5 also allows an image to be saved on, or read from, an NTFS filesystem, although NTFS is not normally accessible from a DOS program. Whoever wrote this, is s/he sure of this? I am pretty sure that this has been added in 8.0 not 7.5, since we use 7.5 and we can't write to NTFS. We never upgraded to 8.0 because you needed two boot disks from this point one instead of one, because the DOS-based ghost.exe got so big, that it now needs a complete disk of its own. Lofote 06:31, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
- It looks like you're right, so I've updated the article accordingly. Thanks!-gadfium 08:12, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
- Just to add on, this is the case. Adam
[edit] Ghost 10?
This article contains only a single reference to Ghost 10 - its release date - and otherwise seems to focus on version 9 as being the current version. I don't know enough about Ghost to correct this properly. - Brian Kendig 17:26, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
