Norton Ghost as the new FD-ISR?

Hi all, I am not an FD-ISR user but have read about it on these forums, so I thought this might be the right place.

I've recently installed and tested Norton Ghost 14 to image and take backups and am very happy with it. Here's what I liked -

Recovery disc
- Its VistaPE based, which means much better device compatibility than Linux ones. Paragon and SP also offer this I think.
- the recovery disc creator will compare drivers in use and put them on the disc, so all connected devices will work.
- it has utilities to scan for viruses, fix disc errors etc

LightsOut restore
- this feature puts a recovery environment on disc which you can boot into.
- it adds an entry to the Vista bootloader which you can see in bcdedit, instead of creating a new bootsector

Speed
- backup and restore both were quite fast for me. For a 7gb windows partition, I got a 2.3gb image with high compression.
- I was able to take incremental image snapshots in <1min

Other neat features
- can mount recovery disc as a virtual drive.
- can convert to VM

I tested with setting up LightsOut, then taking an image to a 2nd disc. This image was copied to external usb, as well as my laptop. Then I burned a recovery disc. I tested the following restores -

- boot into LO environment, or from cd
- recover from 2nd hdd, usb, or mapping network drive

I am now able to make a snapshot of my partition easily and keep those wherever I want. I am not an FD-ISR expert but to me the main differences are there is no dedicated rescue partition, and no shared folder support, which I don't need as my user profile and data is kept on a separate partition for exactly this reason.

This is the 1st time I have thoroughly tested image restores and I have now setup a backup job to take incrementals every week. Ghost can manage the space to delete the old ones. It has been great so far!

 

Hi sounds like your really happy with it. I used to use Ghost years ago and found it worked well. Things wer alot simpler then when it came to imaging and it was before symantec bought it. I did try a few versions under the symantec ownership and always had inconsistent results where ultimately I found Acronis and had been quite happy with it for years. Anyhow I wanted to ask you if you had any experience with Acronis and if so how would you compare this new Ghost against it? Appreciate any info and while I love Acronis overall, I sure would like to also have a product that doesn't use a linux boot disk. Thanks..

 

When I tried Acronis it did not restore the Vista bootloader properly. It was a simple fix using the Vista repair option from the install dvd which does it automatically, but it did not exactly fill me with confidence.

 

Not looked at it but does not sound like much of a replacement for FD. Personally I prefer shadow protect for imaging and HIR or P2V.

 

If you can boot into a new Ghost snapshot as fast as your computer reboots, and update the snapshot of your C:drive (for me 39GB) in about 5 minutes - and every snapshot is as reliable as a FDISR snapshots, and you dont have to store the snapshots on the C:drive. Then it might even be better than FDISR.

I didnt have that good experience with Ghost 12 and 14 but if you are happy with it, you should use it. Sounds like a good substitute for FDISR now that you cant buy FDISR anymore.

 

its not a replacement for FD-ISR.
but it is a very decent program.
only two things annoyed me about it.
1. very slow starting at boottime from when the splash screen loaded and dispaered.
2. the notifications everytime the backup is run.
can you turn the notifications off?

if you can turn off the notifications and it loaded faster i woould buy it right away.

you say the disc can scan for viruses, does that mean it has the lastest nav on the disc and an inbulti updator?

 

A simple, but very handy feature.

Is it writeable ?

 

I have a Ghost question! I have G10 and the recovery disc was made while XP was SP2. It's now SP3. Could I take my G10 setup disc and "reinstall" G10 and in effect sort of slipstream SP3 on to it? I never did try booting from it as recommended. I was always kind of afraid what might happen!

 

yes you can turn off, fallow this

open Ghost
go Advance and select a drive
click Customize status reporting
and select errors only

i dont have any slow starting at boottime

 

hey mata7,
thanks.
btw i tested the symantec backup exec. which is the same product but aimed at the business environment. will try it later to see if the newest version doesnt have the slow start. last time i tryed it was a few months ago.

 

your welcome, have fun

 

Do you mean the added entry in the Vista boot menu? There is a ghost task which runs on startup, I suppose you could prevent it from starting.

There is a virus defs folder with an updater exe inside it, but honestly I haven't tried it myself so I don't know how it works.

No.

Like I said, I'm not an FDISR user so I don't know what it can do other than reading about it. I have used Paragon products before to take an image, but Ghost is the first produt I've seen that has a very easy UI, a solid engine behind it, and lots of added functionality.

 

Hey defcon, i mean when you login to windows you get a symantec splash screen that takes ages to disapear and then finaly the tray icon appears with all the options.

 

lodore the splash screen only open the first time you install ghost after rebot, then you wont see splash screen again any more at least on my comp

 

When I get home I'm going to disable Ghost on startup and that should get rid fo the splash screen. It has not bothered me so far because -

1. I don't restart the OS that often
2. The Vista sidebar also takes it own sweet time coming up, but while these things are happening explorer, start menu etc are usable, so I don't mind

I hope even if Ghost is not running all the time, it won't how it works (detecting drives that are plugged in, event triggers etc) because there is a windows service running anyway.

 

I know nothing about Norton Ghost but if I were to try it would you recommend uninstalling FDISR first?