Thinkpads Forum

Forgive me if this is old news, but I had an epiphany today .

The normal process to backup my important systems is to use Ghost and clone the hard drive onto another drive that I've installed in an Ultrabay HD adapter. I then remove that backup drive and store it in a not-so-safe place (same room as I keep my systems, not off-site ). In any event, I've realized that my collection of hard drives with labels on them explaining what, when and where they are from is getting out of hand. There's several 20GB, 40GB and 60GB drives which only have 5-15GB of data on them.

So, in order to recover some of them to be used as working drives, I looked into the process of writing disk images onto optical media. For this first attempt I used CDs. My test was done on a clone of a Windows 2000 drive that I kept from a 650Mhz 600X. gator may recognize this description . Anyway, using a 500Mhz 600X, an external floppy drive, a GCC-4240N CD burner, and a standard Ghost boot floppy, I was able to put the 3GB or so of data from the 60GB drive onto 2 1/2 700MB CD-R disks. I used a "fast" compression setting and it took about 30 minutes (forgot to write down the elapsed time). Restoring the multi-CD image back onto another 60GB drive took 15 minutes and was very easy. The best part of this procedure is that the CD image set is bootable so all I needed to do was put the first CD in and boot the 600X. During the initial image process a copy of the Ghost boot floppy had been transferred from diskette onto the CD. A simple "restore from image" command and two disk swaps copied everything to the new drive.

My next test will be to try this out on a T23 using a DVD burner and a larger data set. There's a disk drive from another previously owned system which I have that would be perfect for that operation. If it works like the CDs, then Purcy, expect a DVD or two to arrive soon thereafter .

rkawakami wrote:<snip>

Have you considered using Ghost to put multiple images on another drive with folders that describe what they are?

I do that, and just use one 3.5 inch USB drive with multiple folders, with multiple images for 5 different machines.

Moderator note: Trimmed quote

Yes, but that would mean putting all my eggs in one basket and I don't like doing that. If that ONE drive went bad, that would mean I would lose four or more backups. I'm sure that disk drive technology has improved somewhat than the old 10MB Data General disk packs I used to replace quite regularly but I still don't trust rotating magnetic platters all that much .

Yeah, I know that optical media may not be all that impervious to age either but it's cheaper and I can make several copies on different brands of disks. What are the chances that they all go bad?

rkawakami wrote:Yes, but that would mean putting all my eggs in one basket and I don't like doing that. If that ONE drive went bad, that would mean I would lose four or more backups. I'm sure that disk drive technology has improved somewhat than the old 10MB Data General disk packs I used to replace quite regularly but I still don't trust rotating magnetic platters all that much .

Yeah, I know that optical media may not be all that impervious to age either but it's cheaper and I can make several copies on different brands of disks. What are the chances that they all go bad?

Good point, of course. And I ought to follow my own advice here and say, it's then a good idea to copy the contents of one drive over to a 2nd drive. It's time consuming when the files are multiple gigs in size, but good old RoboCopy or SynkBack will take the labor out of the task.

Come to think of it I'm going to fire up my 2nd 3.5 inch USB drive and do that....Let the machines do the work while I sleep..

I had the opportunity today to perform an image restore operation from a set of Norton Ghost 2003 DVD disks. While I was at it, I took some photos and threw together a web page which walks you step-by-step through the system restore procedure. The page is at:

http://www.kawakami-ca.com/ghost_2003/dvd_restore/
(Warning: 15 images of around 60KB each)

Before I shipped out a T23 a couple of weeks ago, I used Ghost 2003 to write a hard drive disk image onto two DVDs. During that process, a copy of the Ghost DOS program is placed onto the first DVD, thus making it bootable. All you need to do is boot that disk and follow some simple steps.

Sometime later I'll have to document the procedure for creating the image . Basically I boot the target system using a Ghost floppy disk (via a port replicator) and use an Ultrabay DVD burner to create the image. Ghost has the ability to compress the data being written in order to save some on some optical media but at the cost of taking additional time to perform the backup.

CDs can also be used if the hard drive disk image is small enough. I've done some previously for a 600X running Windows 2000. I think that image spanned five or six CDs. Certainly for XP, it's better (and easier) to use DVDs.