What does Norton Ghost Do?

[Caveman]

My understanding is that it's a betterr version of "System Restore" that XP already has... What does it do better and why would one choose to use it (over XPs system restore)?

 

[nageov3t]

fight any astronauts lately? hehe.

the best use of Norton Ghost is to copy one drive onto another. like, if you buy a bigger hard drive and don't want to re-install everything, you can "ghost" the image of your old hard drive onto the new one. alternatively, you can use it to create a CD image of your drive in case if your hard drive later fails.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Ghost can be used to make a backup image of your drive partitions that you can use to restore later. Depending on the version of Ghost you have, you can also have the image to span across mulitple CDs if writing to the hard drive is not possible.

For example, I always make a Ghost image of my C:\ drive once I have WinXP, Windows updates, drivers, and applications installed. That way, if I need to reformat later, it takes 10mins to restore the Ghost image, instead of the 3-4hours of installing the items individually.

It basically takes a "snapshot" of the drive that can be restored fully.

 

[Caveman]

Sounds like a great util... Is the snapshot image a fraction of the size of the actual?

 

[Sid59]

Originally posted by: Caveman
Sounds like a great util... Is the snapshot image a fraction of the size of the actual?

yes. depending on the compression set, it can reach around 50% of the partition "USED" size.

as mentioned, ghost freezes and captures a moment (preferably a solid, non buggy) of your partition.

imagine you were about to go all the way with a chick but forgot to put a condom on. then 9 months later you have a baby. usually not good.

but if you stopped and froze the moment before you started sex, to freeze and capture the moment, to put on a jimmy, you could "GHOST" back to that period and pretend the last 9 months didn't even exist.

travel back in time without a time machine.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: Caveman
Sounds like a great util... Is the snapshot image a fraction of the size of the actual?

Yes, you can use high or normal compression for the image. file. Just to give you an idea, with WinXP and applications, my 2.2gb C:\ partition can be compressed enough to fit on a single 700mb CD-R.