So, whats the difference between Norton Ghost and Windows system restore? Aside from the hard drive copying.
What I'm asking is, specifically what it is meant by the term "Ghosting"? Also any in depth detail on what else it does.
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Anonymous2006-01-15 7:07
Norton Ghost is used to make a copy of the entire contents of a hard drive or partition, either to another drive or partition, or to an image file (a file that may or may not be compressed, containing the same information as the source drive). This has to be done from outside Windows - you boot from a floppy or CD containing the Ghost executable. System Restore however, runs all the time within Windows XP and Me (unless turned off). It monitors system and program-related files for any changes, makes backups of anything that is changed and can, on demand, restore any changed files to theoretically return a system that has had these file damaged, removed or overwritten to the same state it was at before. System Restore *doesn't* back up documents, pictures, etc.
Ghost and similar cloning programs are useful for backing up an entire system for safety purposes (eg. for making a factory restore disc, or before doing major and potentially risky work like repartitioning a drive, upgrading the OS, etc), or for when you're setting up multiple hardware-identical computers (make one "master", clone it to the other computers). System Restore is only meant to be used as a simple way to get a system that was damaged by a bad software installation, virus, etc. back to working order. It's not a backup solution in any way, shape or form.
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Anonymous2006-01-15 10:31
Norton Ghost is a bloated overpriced GUI that performs the same job as an old tool called dd. It's not even as flexible as dd, admittedly partly due to limitations of the OS it runs on.
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Anonymous2006-01-15 13:31
So ghost uses a floppy disk to bootup and restore when you just can't possibly get back...I see. That is pretty useful. Thanks >>2 Just one more thing, can ghost do the same thing as system restore? What I mean is, lets say I want to upgrade firefox and it doesn't work anymore, and I want my original setting of firefox. Does it do that?
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Anonymous2006-01-15 14:01
>>4
You can use Ghost to back up the system prior to installing new software, then restore that backup if it all goes pear-shaped. There's nothing stopping you using the bootdisk part of Ghost to make a complete system backup and later restore it (though of course you lose *all* changes to that drive or partition, including files created or edited, emails received, etc). There are also features in the Windows-based part of the program that back up changes and can restore them if need be, but nobody uses it for that when we already have System Restore to do much the same thing. Frankly, its only real use is for restoring systems to a default state, like the factory restore disks that come with many prebuilt systems and laptops. I use it at my workplace if a computer is having problems - we have disk images of the various computers with all the software ready installed, so if a system has to be rebuilt it takes less than half an hour instead of an entire day.
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Anonymous2006-01-17 14:51
Norton Ghost = Symantec = Overpriced piece of bullshit
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Anonymous2006-01-17 16:04
>>6
Duh. But Ghostcast Server is a real timesaver when installing/upgrading many computers in a suite.