Norton Ghost 9.0: questions before buying

[andy]

Hi, I need to start backing up my WHOLE computer, and my search has led me to the above product. I was all set to get it when someone put some doubts in my mind. They are:

1) Say your hard drive (which is, say, 50GB) crashes, and you buy a new one which is 200GB. When you load on the image of the previous hard drive, will you still have access to your new 150 worth of GB, or will you only ever see the 50GB? I hope you understand this!? I can't see it happening, otherwise you'd have to keep getting the same size HDD, but you never know!

2) Say you have used up 10GB on a 100GB hard drive. When you back up, will Ghost only back up the 10GB (ie, take less discs), or will i have to have a box of DVD's ready to back up the 100GB? Again, you're probably laughing, but hey, as long as i get an answer!

3) Naturally, this leads me to another question: Is it any good? From what i hear, the standard Windows backup is not all that. What i want is something that copies everything easily, copies it to dvds/cds, and will work.

Many thanks

[Ginsu543]

Norton Ghost is not backup software but drive imaging software. It was designed for companies to make it easier for them to setup many computers with the same hdd configuration. I haven't used Ghost before, but I do use their competitor, PowerQuest Drive Image. They should work similarly though. To answer your questions, if you take an image of a 50GB drive and copy it to your 200GB drive, you should be able to use the 150GB. Second, Ghost should back up only the 10GB of data on your 100GB. Third, I've heard very good things about Ghost. It's considered the best.

[andy]

Thanks for replying - it's appreciated. I have a sneaky suspicion that Norton bought out the company you say, so it's probably just a souped up version of that.

If anyone has used Ghost before, can you please speak up? Cheers.

[stlouis1]

i use ghost all the time, so heres you're answers in order

#1 if you're ghosting a smaller drive to a larger drive, you will have the option to expand the partitions. but you cannot shrink them (ie: ghost to a smaller drive)

#2 im not to sure what you mean by this one. but if you want to make a ghosted image of the hard drive and store it on another hard drive, the image file will only be as big as the size of the data, you also have the option to compress it further, but it takes longer. and if you're doing it in dos, you'll need another hard drive formatted with fat32 to save the image to, or an ntfs reader that has write capability

#3 ghost is great, i keep a clean image of my drive on another drive so when my machine crashes, cuz either i do something stupid or sh!t just naturally happens, i can back up any new data and ghost it back within a half hour or so, its much faster than reinstalling, plus i have all my settings preset, its a great time save. i use an older version of ghost, i like it better because its not specific to any file system, so i can back up any unknown file system (my mp3 player) bit for bit, where as the newer version wont allow me. but ghost is great, bottom line

[andy]

Cheers for helping out.

I must admit I have no idea about HHD formats and their implications (although I do know mine is NTFS); I just need an image to have as a backup in case the HHD fails for some reason.

Expanding partitions - so you treat the entire new HHD as a single partition and expand the image out to the whole of the HHD? As long as I could take advantage of the edditional space on the new HHD, that's cool.

The more data I have, the more dvd's I need. Got it!

Many thanks one and all...

[mbritton2]

thanks for all the info