Talk:Disk cloning

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Please be aware that I am not a neutral party in this article. I work for Symantec on the Ghost product. I'm proud of Ghost, and no doubt that shows through in the article. Feel free to change it to a more neutral point of view.

Although I've spent the last seven years working on disk cloning, I'm not aware of all the other programs in this sector. I'd be delighted if some of my competitors could jump in and help flesh out the article.--Gadfium 06:12, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Is there any free software alternative? We may point it out. -- Toytoy 14:02, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

I replied to this on the Talk:Ghost (software) page, because that's where I saw the question first, although the reply is probably better suited to this page. If you actually check out any of the programs I mentioned there, or find anything else, you might like to add a mention to this article.-gadfium 18:27, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm not a member, but i might suggest a reference on the links down the bottom at least to clonezilla, partimage, and drbl (diskless remote boot for linux) These are all open source, free and largely complete soltuions. with clonezilla and drbl, you can actually clone straight from a server onto a computer without a boot disk or any additional software on the machine. Handy!

I've added links to clonezilla and partimage. Drbl is linked to from the clonezilla page, and doesn't seem as relevant to this article.-gadfium 03:24, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 History-part 2 Let's Add Other Platforms 3 Software 4 Backup

[edit] History-part

Howdy! I noticed the following sentence in the History-section:

Ghost was the first disk cloning program.

Personally, I would prefer something like the following:

Ghost was one of the first commercially available disk cloning programs.

AFAIK, PowerQuest DriveImage/DriveCopy was also available around 1995/1998, although I am unable to find a quote or article on that right now. And who could forget dd, which has been around for ages and is utilized by g4u (mentioned in External Links).

While dd, diskcopy and so on were around long before Ghost, they are not disk-cloning programs except in the narrowest sense of the word. They copy the entire disk, not only the used parts of the partitions. They cannot resize partitions. They do no post-cloning operations, and they require tho original operating system to be able to restore an image. Similarly, various file copy programs including zip were around long before Ghost, and they were used for computer rollout, but they have most of the same limitations.

Ghost was the first disk cloning program. It was a novel concept, and created the market segment called Disk cloning. PowerQuest was one of several companies which recognised this new market segment and competed in it. I don't know when they launched their first disk cloning product, but it certainly wasn't before Ghost, and I doubt they would claim not to have been inspired by Ghost. PowerQuest was already a successful software company with partition resizing software.-gadfium 20:17, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

AFAIR it's true that Ghost was the first program to incorporate the functions of copying (like for instance PQ DriveImage/DriveCopy), resizing and creating different filesystems (like PQ PartitionMagic) in one application, which is IMHO why Ghost is/was so successful. So, it comes down to the definition of disk cloning, which is formulated in the article as "... a category of software which copies the contents of one computer hard disk to another". dd conforms to this definition, so the sentence "Ghost was the first disk cloning program." would be wrong, IMO. This, because of the fact that dd has shipped with UN*X for at least 12 years, and is available commercially and as open source. I reckon it's safe to say that dd isn't inspired by Ghost ;). Considering your and my opinions, is the current definition of disk cloning the right one? Please comment, TIA!

[edit] Let's Add Other Platforms

I'll be glad to do the Mac OS X part, but shouldn't we: 1. Create a stub page and 2. Move this page to a "Windows" subcategory?

I was looking for Mac OS X info and had to read a moment to figure out this was Windows-specific (and not X86 specific as it says in the article).

I'm sorry if I sound like a dummy, here, I'm pretty new to the editing side of Wikipedia, so thanks for your patience.

At the time this was written, x86 excluded the Mac. The article does cover Linux on x86. Expanding it to cover Mac OS X on x86 and PPC would be great, but I don't have the expertise to do so.-gadfium 19:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Software

I've added all programs I know to the software section. I've used external links for the apps that don't have Wikipedia Articles. Please do not remove these external links unless you create an Wiki article about each of these programs. We must try to keep wikipedia readable. Suaven 09:31, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Backup

I'm curious.. The article currently mentions "Although disk cloning programs are not primarily backup programs, they are sometimes used as such". Is this still true? Although I recognize the value of a backup application over a cloning application (backup application being much faster), I think it should be noted that backup applications are typically incapable of backing up your full installations. I.e. if you lost your drive you can get back at your data files, but be prepared to re-install the application to work with those data files. Whereas with a clone, restoring the clone is all that is required to be back up and running in addition to being able to restore individual files? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ZeBoxx (talk • contribs).

If you use a disk cloning program to make a copy of your hard disk, on another disk, tape or network drive, then you can recover your disk very easily in the case of disaster, but most disk cloning programs cannot make incremental backups, so each backup is very large and slower than an incremental backup. The disk cloning program may require rebooting the system to Dos or similar while it makes the copy.

A backup program mostly requires the original operating system to be reinstalled before you restore a disk, but has great flexibility in making various types of incremental backups, and allows you to continue using the computer while the backup is made. It is also usually more flexible at allowing restore of individual files. A backup program will not do post-cloning configuration, or multicasting. I would expect a full backup or restore is likely to be slower with a backup program than a disk cloning program, but I've never run benchmark comparisons.

There is certainly some overlap, with some backup programs capable of doing bare-metal restores. I don't know if such backup programs allow changing partition sizes, but I expect they would.

I can't actually answer your question about whether cloning programs are used as backup, other than that I know a number of people who do this.-gadfium 05:58, 20 March 2007 (UTC)