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Alternatives to Norton Ghost

News Recommended Links Windows Filesystems Recovery Filesystems Internals Partimage Disk Backup Disk Partitioning
Minimalistic and Rescue Linux Distributions Knoppix   SystemRescueCD History Humor Etc

Initially there is not that much competition to Ghost but as times goes some worthwhile competitors emerged. Among the most promising we can mention the following: 

Among Windows analogs the most prominent alternative is Acronis True Image (Windows;  PC Magazine Editors' Choice Award)

On any bootable linux CD or partition you can try

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OpenSourceGhosting - HOSEF

There was a discussion on the hosef list of open source alternatives to ghost||http://lists.hosef.org/pipermail/luau/2004-August/015613.html. The basic idea was, how do you use linux/open source to backup or deploy windows systems? (On linux systems this will work too, though there are ways to do it that are more native to linux.) [This message||http://lists.hosef.org/pipermail/luau/2004-August/015640.html] gave me most of my clues, it mentions knoppix and partimage, as well as the [SystemRescueCd rescue cd||http://www.sysresccd.org/] that has [qtparted||http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/] on it. Another post mentions a utility named [g4u||http://rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de/~~feyrer/g4u/]. [g4l] is another project, maybe forked off of g4u? I'm having trouble finding reviews/descriptions/documentation.

Here are three approaches for three different situations:

Contents

[hide]

 Home Backup

  1. In windows, defrag your disk.
  2. Boot from a knoppix||http://www.knoppix.net live CD and use [partImage] to copy the partition to a CD.
  3. To restore the image, boot from knoppix and use partimage in reverse.

For example, on my first try I used an external firewire disk (sda1). I booted knoppix, openned a shell, and

  1. su root
  2. mount /dev/sda1
  3. partimage

Make sure the disk where you plan to save the image has enough space and you have write permission. The partition you are copying should be dismounted. I had trouble trying to restore an image that had been saved using zip compression, but the unzipped version worked fine.

 Lab, no netboot

  1. Set up a "golden" windows system, one that has everything you want and nothing you don't want.
  2. Defrag the partition.
  3. run sysprep to erase machine-specific info.
  4. Boot from Knoppix and use partimage and samba to copy the partition to a disk on the net, or to CDs.
  5. To restore the image, boot from knoppix and use partimage in reverse.

 Lab with netboot

  1. Set up a netboot image that has partimage and samba.
  2. Defrag the partition.
  3. run sysprep to erase machine-specific info.
  4. Boot the client from the net image.
  5. check that all dependencies in partimage are satisfied by the client or use static.
  6. check to make sure the clients have ide-disk loaded and the nodes for the devices you are backing up/restoring exist.
  7. to fully automate a backup we need to have a script that fetches all the partition names and stores them in a unique folder after invoking partimage with the appropriate command line options. afaik this can't be left unattended for ntfs atm.
  8. Use partimage and samba to copy the partition to a disk on the net, or to CDs.
  9. To restore the image, boot from knoppix and use partimage in reverse.

You can use NFS instead of samba.

 Reducing image sizes

This is from the g4upage, a few suggestions that should help with increasing the compression of any ghost-type image.

  1. Check the utilities and tips listed under section 5.10 Reducing the image size. There are some for various *nices and for Windows too.

 

[Sep 9, 2008] Clonezilla 1.2.0-20 (Live testing) by Steven

About: Clonezilla is a partition or disk cloning tool similar to Symantec Ghost. It saves and restores only blocks in use on the hard drive if the file system is supported. For unsupported file systems, dd is used instead. It has been used to clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.

Changes: The language files fr_FR and ja_JP were updated. There is better support for the Asus Eee PC. Some minor bugs were fixed.

WikiStartEn - Linbox Rescue Server - Trac

The Linbox Rescue Server is an asset management software including 5 modules :

[Sep 2, 2008] Trinityhome Blog - Latest news

August 27, 2008 | http://trinityhome.org/

Yet another version of TRK 3.3, now at build 321.
This is a release candidate for the final TRK 3.3.  After that, work should start for TRK 4.0 and probably a long period of radio silence

New stuff in this version:

-kernel 2.6.26. Hope this kernel is more stable on different hardware. I also eliminated a serious disk performance flaw: it seems that since some kernel around 2.6.23, the generic and slow IDE driver had become the default, resulting on really slow I/O performance on normally fast sata controllers. This "bug" has been present since build 310 and is now fixed. Generic IDE is only available as a modules anymore and so the "good" driver for your controller is now detected. Examples for this were machines with certain ICH8 controllers (and there 's lots of them).
-latest NTFS Tools and Library (2.0.0). Watch out with Windows Vista and earlier version of TRK. It could ruin your NTFS when f.e. trying to resize your volume. I will know, I messed up my own Vista. Luckily tesdisk got my partitions back, but I had to go through a lot of trouble afterwards to get my Vista back online.
-relocntfs: a patched version of ntfsreloc which does great things with the NTFS bootsector.
-mclone: haaa, now this is the finest new feature on TRK. Forget about the old clonexp in TRK, mclone or mass clone is a utility that allows you to clone an unlimited number of computers over multicast at the maximum speed of your hardware.
The main features are:
-make exact copies of any operating system
-optimized for Windows XP and Vista imaging using ntfsclone. Other filesystems are copied with dd-fast and scalable
-save to image and restore from image (to multicast) with optional 3 compression algorythms (gzip, bzip2 and 7-zip)
-restore original bootsector/ntfs c/h/s values. An old bug in many BIOS' sometimes gave wrong values for Cylinders/Heads/Sectors count. Although CHS is an old method for assigning disk geometry (LBA should be used), Windows XP and family still use it to assign addressing of their bootcode. Recent Linux kernels discard wrong C/H/S values and set it to the LBA values. This resulted on sometimes unbootable cloned Windows machines (the blinking cursor nightmare). Recently a patched version of relocntfs appeared (now called ntfsreloc) which is able to "force" original C/H/S values in your NTFS. Mclone does it automatically for you. Major feature over other cloning tools.
-run up to 50 different sessions separately over your LAN
-optional speed limitation. Just so your LAN doesn't get saturated.
-option to specify disks/partitions instead of just everything automatically

[Aug 28, 2008] FOG A Computer Cloning Solution - FOG Overview

Fog is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP and Vista that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. Fog doesn't use any boot disks, or CDs; everything is done via TFTP and PXE. Also with fog many drivers are built into the kernel, so you don't really need to worry about drivers (unless there isn't a linux kernel module for it). Fog also supports putting an image that came from a computer with a 80GB partition onto a machine with a 40GB hard drive as long as the data is less than 40GB.

Fog also includes a graphical Windows service that is used to change the hostname of the PC, restart the computer if a task is created for it, and auto import hosts into the FOG database. The service also installs printers, and does simple snap-ins.

[Aug 20, 2008] Clonezilla

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

[Aug 19, 2008] UBCD for Windows

UBCD4Win is a bootable recovery CD that contains software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing almost any computer problem. Our goal is to be the most complete and easy to use free computer diagnostic tool. Almost all software included in UBCD4Win are freeware utilities for Windows®. Some of the tools included are "free for personal use" copies so users need to respect these licenses. A few of the tools included in UBCD4Win are paid for and licensed software owned by UBCD4win. On occasion we work with software companies/authors for permission to include their software in our download or have requested their software better support PE. Users can freely share copies of UBCD4Win with friends but selling UBCD4Win for a profit is not acceptable. We have worked hard for many years helping people for free with this project, others should not make money from our hard work. If you are a dialup user having a hard time downloading UBCD4Win, please visit our ordering page. UBCD4Win is based on Bart's PE©. Bart's PE© builds a Windows® "pre-install" environment CD, basically a simple Windows® XP booted from CD. UBCD4Win includes network support and allows you the ability to modify NTFS volumes, recover deleted files, create new NTFS volumes, scan hard drives for viruses, etc. Our download includes almost everything you need to repair your system problems. This project has been put together to be the ultimate recovery cd and not a replacement OS (Operating System). Please visit the "List of Tools" page for a complete list of what is included in the latest version of UBCD4Win.

There are requirements for building this CD which can and may make it difficult for everyone to build the project. Please understand that these requirements and restrictions are due to copyright laws, etc. When starting this project I wanted it to be as easy as possible. I wanted it to be a simple ISO file download just like the original Ultimate Boot CD. I had to weigh the ease of build and functionality very carefully. After much thought and research I decided that Bart's PE© was the best way to accomplish this task. That decision required a different type of build and more steps for the end user. Yes more complicated, but I prefer to think of these additional steps in a positive way. We provide detailed instructions and our forum for help. Inexperienced users will feel a sense of accomplishment and gain knowledge when they successfully build the CD.

Remember that we are a freeware tool. We still have hosting and other costs to pay every month. If UBCD4Win has helped you and you are able to, please consider donating

[Aug 18, 2008] Partition Saving point d'entrée entry point

This is another "Last of Mogicans" can be used from DOS boot disk.

Saving is a DOS and Windows program that is used to save, restore and copy hard-drive, partitions, floppy disk and DOS or Windows devices.

With this program you could save all data on a partition to a file (such as you could save this file on a CD for example). Then if something goes wrong, you can completely restore the partition from the backup file. You no longer have to reinstall every piece of software from scratch. All you have to do is restore the partition from the backup file and then update any software that was modified since the backup was created.

Note: beware of software which installs or modifies files on multiple partitions (e.g. Windows programs which update the registry or DLLs that may be on other partitions). If one partition is saved or restored, you must include others (otherwise, inconsistencies could prevent software from running).

Partition Saving is able to compress data (using the gzip compression algorithm) and split it up into several files (e.g. if you need to save a 2 Gb partition onto a CD, this can be done by compressing it and, if necessary, splitting it up into 650 Mb files). Most partition types are supported. In the case of FAT (12, 16 and 32), ext2/3 and NTFS partitions, you can choose between saving all sectors or in-use sectors only.

For more information, please read documentation (a current text version is included in the program files, but the FAQ section may be more recent).

To download Partition Saving click here.

If you need help, you could email me (I will update the FAQ page with comments and questions received). If you do not receive a reply after some time, please try again, perhaps your email or the subsequent reply became lost or the mail title was not explicit enough.

Official website of Partition Saving is http://www.partition-saving.com. If you put link on some web pages, please use only this address, not the one this one is redirected to.

Thanks to all those who discovered bugs and helped me to resolve them, to those who asked me questions and to all who sent emails with encouragement or advice to improve this program.

[Jan 6, 2008] Clonezilla 1.0.9-1 (Live testing) by Steven


Jan 6th 2008  | Freshmeat

About: Clonezilla is a partition or disk cloning tool similar to Symantec Ghost. It saves and restores only blocks in use on the hard drive if the file system is supported. For unsupported file systems, dd is used instead. It has been used to clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.

Changes: An option to use Partclone was added (experimental). Partclone supports ext2, ext3, Reiserfs, Reiser4, XFS, and HFS+. Therefore by using "-q2" in Clonezilla, the HFS+ filesystem of Intel Macs can be saved efficiently. A new option was added: -q1|--force-to-use-dd, which forces dd to be used to save any filesystem. An option was added to remove page and hibernation files of MS Windows before saving an image.

[Dec 20,2007] freshmeat.net Project details for Partimage Is Not Ghost by Natan

Partimage Is Not Ghost 2.01.10

About: Partimage Is Not Ghost (PING) is a live Linux ISO based on LFS (Linux From Scratch). It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated in a PXE/RIS environment. Several tools that make it the perfect choice for easily backing up and restoring whole partitions are included. It supports backups to and from SMB shares, backup of BIOS data, the ability to blank the local admin's password, creation of bootable restoration DVDs, the ability to partition and format a disk before installing Windows, and more.

Changes: Users have the option to have PING reduce NTFS partitions to the maximum before backing them up. That way, such images can be restored to smaller partitions. OS upgrades: Linux kernel 2.6.23.12, Samba 3.0.28, dhcpcd 3.1.8, NTFS-3G 1.1120, and FUSE 2.7.2.

[Nov 16, 2007] freshmeat.net GNU ddrescue 1.6 (Stable)

GNU ddrescue 1.6 (Stable)
 by Antonio Diaz Diaz - Fri, Nov 16th 2007 07:08 PDT  

About: GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. GNU ddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps. The basic operation of GNU ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don't have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile feature of GNU ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.

Changes: This release skips faster over damaged areas. A new pass has been added that trims error areas backward before splitting. Support for sparse output files has been added. Blocks are now split at sector boundaries. The new option "--fill" has been added. This release can resume an interrupted retry pass instead of reinitiating it. It achieves perfect resumability if interrupted during trimming or splitting and handles SIGHUP and SIGTERM. The "--quiet" option quiets error messages. Consistency checks have been added to detect bugs.

freshmeat.net Welcome to freshmeat.net

Clonezilla 1.0.2-1 (Live testing)
 by Steven - Fri, Apr 13th 2007 02:03 PDT

About: Clonezilla is a partition or disk cloning tool similar to Symantec Ghost. Unlike other open source clone tools such as G4U or G4L, Clonezilla saves and restores only blocks in use on the hard drive if the file system is supported. For unsupported file systems, dd is used instead. It has been used to clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.

Changes: A helper program was added to make it easier to mount a device or resource as an image home. Clonezilla is run only in the first console (tty1) when logging in as casper instead of running /etc/rc2.d/S99ocs-live-run. This allows other consoles (2-6) to be available when clonezilla is running. Some modifications were done to increase security.

Acronis True Image 9.0 Downloadable Software - Retail at Newegg.com

$30 for download. Main advantage that this is Windows program like with Ghost 2005 or later  you can use your PC during the image creation.  Unlike ghost 2003 foes not work on windows server -- you need to buy server version.

PCWorld.com - Acronis Revs True Image In my informal tests, Ghost 9 imaged a 3.2GB partition in 1 minute, 25 seconds, generating a 1.4GB image file. My shipping copy of True Image 8 completed an image of the same file in 2 minutes, 42 seconds, but it produced a smaller, 1.2GB file. (True Image 7 took 5 minutes, 34 seconds, making a 2.5GB file.)

The new Acronis True Image 8 feels more like a maintenance release than a major upgrade over version 7. It does, however, boost the backup application's performance to levels comparable to those of Symantec's recently launched (and quite speedy) Norton Ghost 9.

Both programs create sector-by-sector snapshots of your hard drive for easy recovery after a system crash; but in tests conducted for our recent review of Ghost 9, it performed dramatically faster than True Image 7 did, producing smaller images. Like Ghost 9, True Image 8 skips the re-creatable swap and hibernation files, yielding similar speeds and even smaller image sizes.

In my informal tests, Ghost 9 imaged a 3.2GB partition in 1 minute, 25 seconds, generating a 1.4GB image file. My shipping copy of True Image 8 completed an image of the same file in 2 minutes, 42 seconds, but it produced a smaller, 1.2GB file. (True Image 7 took 5 minutes, 34 seconds, making a 2.5GB file.)

Though Ghost 9 is speedier at creating images, True Image 8 is much faster at booting from the recovery disc. In my tests, Ghost 9 took a whopping 2 minutes, 25 seconds to launch, while True Image 8 took only around 15 seconds.

New tweaks in True Image 8 enable you to verify images before restoring them; and like version 7, version 8 can create incremental backups.

True Image 8 enjoys some clear advantages over Ghost 9. It works with any version of Windows (Ghost 9 works only with XP and 2000), it doesn't depend on Microsoft's .Net framework the way its competitor does, and its full version is $20 less expensive.

[Dec 3, 2004] The FreeBSD Diary -- Disk cloning with Acronis True Image

I was chatting to people on IRC about my hardware failure. I mentioned I planned to ghost the disk ("ghost" being a synonym for clone, derived, I expect from Norton Ghost, a well respected disk cloning application).

Cloning an XP disk is not as simple as it sounds. During my googling, I found a few references to id generation. That is, XP keeps an ID somewhere on the drive and this ID has to be reset when cloning the disk. The references indicated that commercial products such as Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image can reset this ID appropriately. A straight dd won't do that.

My experience supports that idea, but I have no proof. I may be encountering some other problem. I found that Acronis True Image did what I wanted. Using dd failed. Mind you, I'm now unable to boot from the original system drive. I don't know why. Perhaps it has been corrupted during the process. I suspect that is why I didn't get dd to work. Read on!

Disk Cloning with Acronis True Image

I expected that installing RAID under XP would be the most challenging. It was actually straight forward. I installed a 3Ware card, hooked up the drives, and pressed ALT-3 when presented with that option during the booting process. I configured the disks for RAID-1 (mirror).

The difficult part was to clone the existing XP boot drive into the RAID array. A hardware RAID array looks exactly like a single drive to the operating system. That should simplify things.

The cloning software I chose was recommended by someone in the Bacula IRC channel. They mentioned Acronis True Image 8.0 by Acronis. This product has a free trial version which lasts for 15 days. I tried it. It worked. I cannot tell the difference between the original drive and the RAID array. Acronis True Image has a nice little Wizard which guides you through the cloning process. I will not go into detail.

... ... ...

I have great words to say about Acronis True Image 8.0. I looked at using Norton Ghost. Actually, I bought Norton Ghost, but will be returning it unopened. The advantage I see in using Acronis True Image is price and download. Acronis True Image costs less than Norton Ghost and you can download it.

 

Recommended Links

In case of broken links please try to use Google search. If you find the page please notify us about new location
Google     

Knoppix links

  1. "KNOPPIX Linux Live CD: What license does the KNOPPIX-CD use?". http://www.knoppix.org/. Retrieved on 2007-07-16.  
  2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-knoppix/2003/01/msg00173.html
  3. a b Knoppix Documentation Wiki:Cheat codes
  4. polishlinux.org - Live CD
  5. http://web.archive.org/web/20050708005508/http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Free hard drive Backup and Restore, hard drive Image and Cloning Utilities (thefreecountry.com) -- a very good list. Highly recommended.

Disk cloning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Contains good discussion of problems in cloning bootable windows partitions, Sysprep, a utility which runs hardware detection scans and sets the SID and computer name freshly when the machine boots and Universal Imaging Utility from Binary Research (original developers of Symantec's Ghost) which incorporates a large number of hardware device drivers into the sysprep routine.

SystemRescueCd

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It is very easy to use: just boot the CDROM. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

If this is the first time you use SystemRescueCd, please read the Quick start guide (english)

Disk cloning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Disk image - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Disk image emulator

Loop device

List of disk cloning software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Backup software for data backup and disaster recovery - Acronis

Partition Saving

g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs this is bit by bit copying without understanding of underling filesystem so the ability to shrink, enlarge partitions is lost.

Partimage

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Last modified: October 18, 2009