How good does Ghost compress files?

[IHateMyJob2004]

I am planning to upgrade my PC and get an external drive. I considered building a new PC, but for my needs, an upgrade will cost less and be sufficient for the next 2-3 years.

Anyways, I plan to image my entire computer. That is one 150 gig hard drive and a second new drive that is TBD in size. The TBD will be determined by what kind of answer I get here. I could go into my thoughts on size requirements, but that is not the point of the discussion for now.

Anyways, as to not bore you I have one simple question. How much will a drive with alot of pictures, movies and music compress? If I had 500 gig of data, what would the image size be assuming I use max compression in Ghost.


I'm doing a test right now with MP3 files and winzip but really want to know what to expect from Ghost.

EDIT: My Winzip test of MP3s compressed 2,735,383k down to 2,708,999k. A reduction of 26384k or 0.964%. Not that great. Kinda what I expected though. I'd expect the same from movies and images.

 

[bruceb]

Ghost has 3 levels of compression ... Fast, None & High ... High will compress the most, but don't expect more than about 10% of the source vs the image size. But if you are moving to a new drive, just use Ghost to Clone the old drive to the new drive.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Thanks for the not on 10% at best.

Any advice on how to best use Ghost to clone? I was planning on imaging my drive and then "pretending" to do a recovery to replace the old drive.

I'm having trouble deciding on how to do this upgrade. I want one rolling backup to be saved. I hope I got the term right. By rolling, I mean that I want Ghost to keep the last image it made when it starts a new image a month later. Only for the scenario where the new image is being made and the computer craps out for some reason. It's a long shot, but I want to plan for this. So, with a 1 TB external drive, I might need to keep a smaller hard drive than desired on hand (150 gig existing and a new 320 gig drive (150+320=470) instead of 150+500=650

Kinda stinks because 320 gig = $60 and 500 gig = $70
Bottom line is that I might just have to play it safe

 

[bruceb]

I use Ghost 2003 and all you need to do is hookup your new drive, then run Ghost to do the clone operation.
I set mine to use PC-DOS and it runs from a DOS window all alone, after you select what you want to do.
Not hard at all, but I don't know if Ghost 14 still has the DOS option, but if it doesn't you should be able to get
to it thru the Ghost CD