Norton ghost 15 compression ratio

I hope i won't regret the decision. Acronis is my favorite by far. And like some other posters it has indeed saved my ass numerous time. Quick and easy backup which takes about 10 minutes and to restore about the same. I will say I have tried Acronis True Image and was disappointed. With version it has a startup auto backup which will show up in your taskbar and begin backing up unless you find the setting to disable, which I couldn't find. I agree on the newer versions Search In. Share More sharing options Followers 0.

Recommended Posts. Posted April 8, Hi, I am making this posting after spending a good amount of time searching on the net and on this forum. What is the difference between cloning and imaging. I thought these were the same thing I have been using Norton Ghost on XP for about 2 years and am inclined towards it.

Which one produces small images when used with full compression Which one is faster Which one is faster While searching before making this post i came across the term SID and the sentence that "The Paragon and Norton Ghost both have a Change SID option".

I assume Norton Ghost 15 also offers this feature? It wouldn't include any free space or deleted data. But if you were using a product that did a full forensic copy then yes, your idea of using a repeating pattern would definatly help the compression.

Dave, I'm probably way out of my depth here, but I think the issue at hand is that the Ghost filter driver has limited resolution bytes and thus it knows which cluster or group of clusters has been made "dirty" by a change, but doesn't necessarily know which portions of the cluster contain the files in question. Therefore it backs up the entire cluster if the filter driver bitmap shows that it was written to.

To the degree that certain clusters are only partially filled with useful data, and the non-useul portion is zerod out, it seems possible that the overall compression ratio could potentially be improved. Thanks, I understand the idea now. I guess it depends if Ghost really does a sector by sector copy or if it's actually doing a cluster by cluster copy. Back to top. NotaCanada Regular Contributor 5. The reviewer, B. Wong, set up a test to simulate such a scenario, and apparently Norton Ghost 15 failed.

Thanks to B. Wong for the review. Be aware that this product is for one PC not one user with multiple PCs. Purchased it for a new Windows 7 laptop. Ghost 14 will not work with Windows 7. Ghost 15 does not seem to be much different. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews.

I just upgrade to Ghost If you have Windows 7 Ultimate, it has restored and backup software included and has the same capability like Ghost 15 except Ghost 15 allow you to restore to a larger hard drive without create new partition when the new hard drive is larger than old hard drive. I would not be surprised if Ghost were treated similarly in the not-distant future.

Partition Magic, which they also acquired from PowerQuest a couple of years back in release 8 has yet to be updated by Symantec. I have removed Symantec Ghost from my system. My recommendation and personal choice going forward for a disk-imaging program is Acronis True Image. DriveImage software now became Ghost 9 and helped drive it to more respectability in advanced users and the enterprise. Now entering its umpteenth edition, shipping as This time it's the acquisition of Veritas to become a part of the fold and incorporated into Ghost with some of those suites.

Symantec decided to drop a release and skip a year, missing version 11 altogether. Absent from the recovery disc and sorry to dwell, is the feature to cold-image. As in take an image of the HDD or partitions without impacting the system by installing software. This is normally done through the boot CD provided. As to restore a whole OS, you need to boot to the recovery disc anyway.

It's a feature that has been missing-in-action and since Ghost four editions ago. In saying that, there was a cheeky, undocumented way to do it in Ghost All in all, it's a very useful tool and is sadly missing from For one, you could take an image of a dead system before you restore, obtaining valuable files to recover at your leisure. With that in mind, there's a new feature coming across from the LiveState recovery Veritas software that enables you to convert a Ghost 12 image into a virtual machine image.

This would be excellent if doubled up with the cold-imaging function for use in corrupt system recovery. We were told in our briefing by the Symantec Ghost product manager that this new software was able to restore previous images, so we tried just that. It failed to restore the Ghost 10 images or even recognize the old.

Not the best for legacy images then, even though two years does not equal legacy in our books. Just a quick note on dual-boot systems and non-Windows file systems back-up and recovery. It's possible and supported within Ghost 12, just as long as it's hidden initially from the OS — it can be seen from Norton Ghost. We tried this and all seem to work rather pleasingly. Here is a short tutorial that will quickly explain how to use Ghost to clone your hard drive to another hard drive.

This is very useful for someone that wants to install a larger hard drive but doesn't want to go through the effort of reinstalling the operating system and all of their programs. When you do this, your new disk should be the same size or larger than the original hard disk. Compared to True Image though, overall performance begins to look a little dated, and Ghost soon falls behind.

A 10GB partition of mixed data took 25 minutes to produce a 7GB image - three minutes faster than True Image but a substantial 1. For restoration, Acronis took 24 minutes, against Ghost's 38 minutes. We also ran into trouble with our first image-restore test, because our external drive was assigned letter Z, the same letter used by the recovery CD for ms-ramdrive, causing a conflict.

This isn't mentioned in the documentation or in Symantec's online support knowledge base, but was a common gripe in online forums. The recovery CD is slow to boot too, taking three minutes in our tests, compared to just 30 seconds for the True Image equivalent. It won't let you create an image while using it either. This prevents the recovery of data not previously backed up from a crashed partition. True Image has no such limitations. The biggest flaw that holds Ghost back is that it hasn't followed True Image by enabling the backup of individual files and folders, and thus isn't a true all-in-one backup tool.

Instead, it's a complete image or nothing - apart from incremental backups, that is. Even here, though, it falls behind Acronis by not having an option for differential backups. Although there isn't much between the two on pricing, the value proposition is another thing altogether. For sheer number of features, flexibility and real-world performance, Ghost 10 fails to compete with True Image 9. As such, unless ease of use is paramount, we can't recommend it. Disk-imaging software lets you create sector-by-sector copies of hard-drive partitions, including boot information--so when disaster strikes, system recovery is a snap.

Symantec and Acronis take different approaches to this crucial task in the latest updates of their disk-imaging applications. Both programs perform the same basic functions of creating and restoring full and incremental images to hard drives, CDs, or DVDs. And the two apps simplify automating and scheduling those processes.

But the shipping version of True Image 9 that I tested permits differential images, which Norton Ghost 10 does not. Whereas incremental backups include only the data that has changed since your last backup, differentials allow you to create a single file containing all of the changes that have occurred since your initial full backup. That way, you never have to restore a large number of small incremental images. Equally useful is the new option to back up selected files and folders, which eliminates the need for a separate file-level backup program.

Acronis has also added a Snap Restore function so you can work in Windows before you finish restoring an image--great if you're on deadline. The biggest change in Norton Ghost 10 is the program's new interface, which does a nice job of guiding beginners through tasks while keeping various advanced options out of sight--but not out of reach. So if your system goes down, the utility can't create an image to help you recover any un-backed-up data stored on a crashed partition. Symantec does bundle the older Norton Ghost included mainly for Windows 98 users , which can create an image while running from its CD.

But True Image 9's recovery CD handles everything that its Windows application can, and that's a far better approach. When it comes to features and price, you can't beat True Image 9.

But I give credit to Ghost 10 for making an esoteric task easier for new users. I backup the second drive each Friday. This Thursday the drive started to behave strangely: first it start to write data very slowly and then stopped writing them at all. When i rebooted the laptop the drive stop to be recognized at all and start to generate strange clicking sound. What are my options? I put a lot of new information exactly this week including several important programs and to recreate them I will require another hours overtime.

I do not have this amount of time and the project is due soon. I am really desperate. Please help The most reliable way to recover data is to use professional restore services it is important to minimize the psychological which is often more severe that data lass.

Google is your friend and you can learn a lot about this problem by searching "IBM Travelstar click of death". Outside paying recovery services your options are really limited. According to internet folklore sometimes cooling or even freezing the drive sometimes helps to revive it for a couple of minutes but in most cases that's it as the reason might be that magnetic substance is gone from the plate and no amount of freezing can change that.

Still this cannot hurt and according to enthusiasts you need to get an external USB enclosure, then slowly cooling the drive first on the lower shelf then up to the freezer to avoid condensation, if this is possible at all.

After 24 hours take either try to run it while it is still in freezer need a long USB cable or get it out with a couple of cool packs and try to power it up and read. Again this is mostly folklore The best strategy in such situation is to keep long time perspective and try "don't sweet the small staff and its' all small staff". Don't overreact. View the situation from the point of view of one year later.

This way you can protect yourself from many useless or even harmful steps people do after losing important data. I know cases when people in a frantic activity after the loss lost even more data. But the most important is to find a reliable way to avoid this situation in the future: you need to do daily incremental backup Types of backup s and not only to USB drive like many users, but on DVD or CD too.

Please remember that USB drive also can fall from the table or just fail. Like with laptop drives there is no guarantee They are pretty reliable long term storage of your data and now are reasonably cheap to use one or even two a day. For most of us the daily working set of files is really small M. If you have Microsoft Services for Unix installed you can use tar and gzip or zip. Your mileage can vary. There are many good incremental backup programs both free and commercial just do not buy them from Symantec's Save and Restore -- this is in essence rebranded Ghost and in comparison with Ghost 10, NSR is pretty backward, unreliable and very slow :- Actually classic Microsoft command like utility xcopy can also be used to copy files to special folder and then burn them as it has option of copying the files that were modified today.

I know that information about such problems evaporates in a year or two but please switch to daily incremental backup in addition to weekly full backups. Our data are worth more then we usually assume and if you ever to hear that "click of death" coming from your drive, you'll be happy to know your most precious data are safe.

This peace of mind worth quote a lot. The data transfer rate reported by the Ghost screen is 31MB per minute. Am I doing something wrong??? A: Looks like you are using USB 1. This can be due to the fact that your laptop has only USB 1. This should be done each time as for some reason Norton ghost GUI does not remember previous setting. Q: i have experienced a problem with Norton ghost which i have tried many methods to solve.. After image creation, i moved the image to another partition for storage purpose, but realize that when i use ghost explore, i cannot find the image i moved.

A: T here is a possibility to open any ghost image in Ghost explorer File-Open , not only files from quick list in file menu. You can try to view file in all files mode to see if this is the case. Also if you move an image from partition to another you need to remember that for large images over 2G it consists of several files.

All files need to be moved. Don't know if Microsoft has been in talks with Symantec, but as for steam rolling over them, I would very much say so not saying it's necessarily a bad thing though :. What's left? Doubt they sell many licenses.

Oh, PCAnywhere! What else? Partition magic? Those who wanted it bought it while it was Powerquest's - and it doesn't even seem to be updated anymore symantec's specialty seems to be driving products into the ground - like novell seemingly. Buggier than ever, sounds like everyone prefers acronis apps for this nowadays. And their apps are getting a LOT more bothersome for their clients - especially the activation part.

Someone I know bought NAV, only to discover it wouldn't let him activate it on 2 PCs or something unlike the old version , and now it's not working anymore plus pay for updates - getting too expensive, he moved to AVG too.

The only thing they seem to have left that's worth buying is their new acquisition, veritas products. But I'm sure they'll manage to make them suck too, and drive them into the ground like everything else.

It seems they're not improving anything, they'd be the LEAST innovative company I could think of, and their junk just keeps getting worse. A: You can try to create Norton bootable floppy, boot from it and see it if the drive is visible.

If it is you can use Norton for creating images in the future. As for the current image repartitioning of existing drive, creating FAT32 partition on it and copying image to it probably the most sensible option you actually mentioned it.

And this is not just a hour or so completely wasted: this partition can save you a lot of time in the future. Windows 10 compatibility is not listed because the article was released before it came out. They all do support Windows 10 though. Veeam Endpoint Backup free is worth considering. It has a nice set of features and is fast for both backup and restore.

Using an older version of Ghost on Windows 7, this seemed to work OK — it supported setting up the bigger partitions on the target drive beforehand and handled cloning to the larger partitions on the target drive. I tried it with Clonezilla, but it seems to want to clone to the target with the only same exact partition size as the source. I am currently using Aomei for my machines and although it is not as fast as the old Ghost or SSR it does the job.

It has restored my test machine several time without an issue. At one point a newest SSR failed when I tried to restore my test machine. Aomei came to the rescue and it did restore it. I am rather impressed with the features it has and the cost for the full version is very reasonable. The free version does not contain the scheduler which is the only limitation on the free version. It is a very good product. I had a failing drive, needed to transfer to a new one.

It took maybe six mouse cliks. If you need it just one time this is the way to go. Looking for tool to copy one windows 8. My goal is for the set up of each computer to be identical.

I need to be able to input the correct Windows license on the second or third or fourth computer as I do this. Can any of the above mentioned products do this so each computer will have its own license when I am finished? As far as I know that is not possible in these 3 applications, and no other backup software may be able to do it either. That should deactivate it so you can enter a new key in the System window.

From your post I understand that you have no problem filling in new license codes. As long as you change the code the moment you start up the machine, you are not into too much legal trouble.

Especially when it is a one-off job of small proportions say like 4 computers. Microsoft does have tools for deploying similar computers where you must fill in the license code when starting up such a computer, but that are solutions for companies and are not nearly as simple or clear-cut as the software discussed here in this article.

Or you could do a full restore. The downside of windows-image-backup is a bare-metal restore may take a lot of manual steps. In a production env, clonezilla is a part of fog which can do bare-metal restore via a small pxe-booted linux environment.

Thanks for the nice article! The article mentions that all 3 will backup to network, Acronis specifically mentions that it backs up to NAS. Hi Raymond, great article.

One thing I did not see is how large the bootable or rescue media need to be. I have flash drives lying around from MB on up. The only thing missing is what size the resulting file s are. Hate to go thru the whole process and find sorry, not enough space on media.

We did a major comparison of resulting file sizes here: raymond. You could always get a full SP1 disc ; raymond. Does anyone use Terabyte to backup their machines? More so, even when validates… I have had more restore failures with Acronis than any other app.

So… now I migrate towards Aomei because they too have the lifetime license and they really make it easy. I even cloned and restored a drive the other day and it worked great. I really think that in these situations when you need to do such critic stuff, like backup of the system you should rely on a good and famous program like Acronis… or the free version of Acronis.

I have tried many backup programs but most of these when the time comes failed. The only program that work for me is todo backup and it is also free. The option is not available in the free version…. Easeus makes the best free Windows partition program, but I am less than thrilled with Todo, so I appreciate this article and an actual email from raymond. I have tried clonezilla and it serves the purpose in most cases.

The ideal solution that I need is browsable image for linux or dual boot systems.