Disk cloning: Ghost vs. True Image?

[RBob]

Notes I find here show a special option (-IB) is required to get Ghost to properly copy the MBRr, but I don't see any mention of anything like this for Acronis True Image. Is this not a problem, or is there some other trick required to make True Image work?

Also, do all versions of Ghost require (or support) this option?

[RBob]

Well, the question is now moot. The drive came yesterday and I successfully cloned my old drive using Acronis True Image.

I did have to use the magic trick of unplugging the drive during shutdown and plugging it back in again as True Image forced a reboot to perform the actual copy. If I hadn't read about that stunt, I'd be off buying a copy of Ghost.

[BruisedQuasar]

Can a program like Ghost be used to clone a drive to a directory of an external hard drive? I use my external hard drive to backup three PCs. I use it manually, like I would use an installed "C" hard drive.

I would like to clone my XP Pro, Wind ME & Win 2000 Pro O/S setups onto one external hard drive (it has ample room to do this).

[Kyocera]

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities ... mage.shtml

this may shed some light on what you are trying to do.

[storage_man]

BruisedQuasar

To clone or not to clone ? - Cloning creates a identical copy of the source drive. that is if you clone a 40gb drive to a 80gb drive, the target drive will be 40gb big. Why u say, because you asked to CLONE which makes a mirror image and a bootable system on the target drive. If you desire to "BACKUP" several different system to a single backup drive, then you want to create a backup IMAGE of the source drive. The target of the image is 1 or more files that may or may not be compressed that contain all of the data/programs etc, from the source drive. It is not bootable in the state that it is in, but can be RESTORED to a drive which would end up being a mirror image of the orginal drive and then would be bootable.

I hope this clears up some misinformation. Both GHOST and TRUE IMAGE perform these functions. Both provide a means of recovery via a standalone bootable disk. If your cloning a disk, you better not be running under windows XP. For example, if you orginally booted windows from the C drive, and you cloned a copy of this drive onto the G drive. and when windows (Booted from the C drive) sees another copy of WINDOWS on the G drive, it disables the MBR on that drive. You will have a perfect copy, but it will never be bootable ie: The G Drive.

The other good thing about backup image copies, is that you can also create INCREMENTAL backups. thus reducing backup time and storage requriements.

Hope this Helps - Storage_man

[RBob]

BruisedQuasar

To clone or not to clone ? - Cloning creates a identical copy of the source drive. that is if you clone a 40gb drive to a 80gb drive, the target drive will be 40gb big.

You're taking the word "clone" to literally.

I used True Image to transfer the contents of my old 40GB drive to a new 60GB drive and True Image did all the "right" things to the partitions and file systems such that all the space on the new drive is properly allocated and useable. I suspect that the same operation performed with Ghost would have worked just as well.

[storage_man]

RBob

You are correct, but what I was trying to explain was BruisedQuasar question about cloning to a partition. Which can't be done.

Storage_man

[Nolonemo]

RBob

You are correct, but what I was trying to explain was BruisedQuasar question about cloning to a partition. Which can't be done.

Storage_man

Except that I believe that TrueImage can restore an image to any partition that's big enough, so that's an indirect form of cloning (insofar as cloning is a bit for bit copy of data as opposed to a file for file copy).

However, it seems to me that what BruisedQuasar really wants to do is to create images of the different OS drives to an external hard drive. (So they could be restored if needed).

BruisedQuasar: A TrueImage image is just a file, and can be copied, moved, etc. TrueImage will even let you mount the image file as a virtual drive, so you can access the contents without actually restoring the image -- very nice if you mangled a system file hacking around in your machine and just want to replace it with the unborked version.

[BillMorrow]

did not read all these posts, but for me..

one word.. TRUE-IMAGE..
well, ok, two words..
ver 9 is out and seems as good as ever but with more options..