NORTON GHOST WEAKNESS EXPOSED!!!! ANYONE KNOW OF AN APP?

[silicon demon]

hiya friends,

i'll keep it simple:

i really 'dig' norton ghost. i ghost my drives regularly, and never had any problems. UNTIL.......i recently re-allocated (freed up) some disk space with Partition Magic. critical error: i re-named some drive letters

Ghost went haywire! it totally refused to mount the image (.v2i) files. After what seemed like an aeon i finally figured out how to recover my raw data from the image file. Good thing it wasn't an image of a bootable drive because i would have been able to recover raw data only......no settings, etc. [ghost's failing is that you can't transfer an image file to another machine or drive, and then mount it.]

Well, lately i've been wanting to back-up very large volumes (50G +)...to and from internal and external drives. i'm abandoning Ghost because the data is critical and i want it in it's raw form...not as an image file. (But one thing i like about ghost is that it can do a bit-by-bit check of the data it transfers.

Standard Windows 'copy' and 'paste' takes forever with a large volume, can abuse virtual memory and 'lock-up' the machine, and i always wonder if some bits get lost.

Anybody know of an app that will let me copy bit-for-bit-- (not create an image/back-up file)...but raw data copying?....that will do it do it fast?....and that will do a bit-by-bit check to assure that what you "copy" is what actually gets "pasted"?

 

[Velk]

Originally posted by: silicon demon
hiya friends,

i'll keep it simple:

i really 'dig' norton ghost. i ghost my drives regularly, and never had any problems. UNTIL.......i recently re-allocated (freed up) some disk space with Partition Magic. critical error: i re-named some drive letters

Ghost went haywire! it totally refused to mount the image (.v2i) files. After what seemed like an aeon i finally figured out how to recover my raw data from the image file. Good thing it wasn't an image of a bootable drive because i would have been able to recover raw data only......no settings, etc. [ghost's failing is that you can't transfer an image file to another machine or drive, and then mount it.]

Well, lately i've been wanting to back-up very large volumes (50G +)...to and from internal and external drives. i'm abandoning Ghost because the data is critical and i want it in it's raw form...not as an image file. (But one thing i like about ghost is that it can do a bit-by-bit check of the data it transfers.

Standard Windows 'copy' and 'paste' takes forever with a large volume, can abuse virtual memory and 'lock-up' the machine, and i always wonder if some bits get lost.

Anybody know of an app that will let me copy bit-for-bit-- (not create an image/back-up file)...but raw data copying?....that will do it do it fast?....and that will do a bit-by-bit check to assure that what you "copy" is what actually gets "pasted"?

Ghost does that doesn't it ? Just do clone drive instead of image.

If you are set against ghost though, acronis trueimage is a competitor.

 

[silicon demon]

thank you, bro.

i will look into trueimage.

actually, i could try to play it off...but the fact is i did not even realize ghost could do that.


i think sometimes we get so cyber-dazzled...and so lost in a vast array of apps, which we often only know how to utilize 10% of.

but i've been looking for an alternative to norton products (resource hogs and intrusive), so i'll look at trueimage.

thanx for your input, buddy