What is "ghosting" and how do you do it?

[FrozenLiquidity]

What is "ghosting" and how do you do it?
What does it do?

[Dave_H]

I think your refering to the program Ghost by Symantec (Norton). An image program like Ghost or Powerquest drive image will make a compressed copy of a hard drive or partition.
While normal backup utilities make an exact copy of folder and files, an image would be an exact copy of the hard drive itself.
Hope that was what you were asking about.
Dave

[howste]

Dave's got it. It's great for setting up multiple PCs with identical software. I used DriveImage to setup 5 computers at work this week. I installed software on one just the way I wanted it and burned an image. After that I just had to run DriveImage and restore the image on each PC. You don't even have to partition or format. About 20 minutes per PC for over a gig of installed programs aint bad! It could have been even faster, but they were older PCs with slow CD drives.

Steve

[NDC]

Yeah, Norton Ghost is a very convenient program to make backups of your hard drive with OS and programs. I used to use Ghost to make a full back up on another hard disk by using the disk to disk feature. When Window starts acting up, I just copy the backup back to the original disk. No hassle of reinstalling OS and applications all over again. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[KAknight]

Of the two I like Power Quest Drive Image much more.

[bhess]

So do you have to install ghost on every machine? Or is there some kind of boot floppy disk? Say I ghost my current harddrive to an older one or a cd. Something happens to my current drive. I have the old drive or cd with the os and apps on it. How do you ghost back to the current drive?

[Dave_H]

I have both Ghost and Drive Image and also prefer Drive Image because in my opinion it is much easier to use.

No, you don't have to install the actual program in order to make or restore an image. You can use it thru boot floppies or burn the actual utility onto the CD with the image. If your system supports booting from a CD, you can make everything on a bootable CD and recover everything without needing anything else. If your system does not support booting from a CD, then all you need is a Windows boot disk and your image CD(s).
Dave

[GroundZero3]

there is also the term ghosting from aol that means to be online signed onto another name thats not yours. PLus i think it also means to be online and no one knows your on thru there buddylist.


JaYsin