Norton Ghost replacement

Laer Carroll

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I use Norton's Ghost to backup my data, but the version is pretty old and not as flexible as I'd like. So I'm thinking of buying a newer version, which is Symantec - Ghost Solution Suite v.2.5 for $31.22. However, it seems to do a lot more than I need. Anyone have experience with it? With a better backup software package?
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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Are you just concerned about backing up your data? As in "My Documents" ?

Ghost, and other software like it, is good for backing up and restoring your entire HD if Things Go Bad. But for just doing a periodic backup of your WORD docs and such like, do this:

1. Get a USB hard drive or big thumbdrive.
2. Get WinZip or one of the freeware workalikes. Or just right-click the folder and do "Send To -> Compressed folder"
3. Periodically zip up My Documents to your thumbdrive, with the date as part of the name of the zipfile. It's damned fast, does what you want, doesn't use up extra space, and isn't complicated.
 

onesecondglance

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I've been using Acronis TrueImage for years and have no complaints.

Where Ghost and TrueImage come into their own is system recovery and migration. They are "image backup" tools, which means they make a map of your entire drive, and can restore to that exact position in time. Apple's Time Machine works on the same basis afaik.

I've been able to swap out failing hard drives and pick up where I left off in under an hour. I also once recovered from a virus I got from a friend's site that had been hacked, again in no time at all.

That said, I agree with Angry Guy - if you don't need that level of protection they are a bit overkill. I do straight file backups as well by simply dragging and dropping to another drive as well as system backups using TrueImage, and to a different drive as well.

Microsoft do a tool called SyncToy, which is actually rather good for file backups. Set a target (your My Documents folder) and a destination (where your backups live) and it can work out which files need to be moved and which to be overwritten (if you want) to make sure your backup is synced to your main folder. TBH I tend to just drag and drop and overwrite everything every time, but if you have a lot of files to backup SyncToy can be very useful.

The ZIP file isn't entirely necessary IMO, given that it's actually more expensive to get a flash drive or SD card with less than 4GB these days, and even a large Word file is usually < 2MB. You should have more than enough space without needing to compress.
 

robjvargas

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If we're only talking documents, all the major cloud storage providers (Google, Dropbox, Onedrive, etc) come with tools for automating that. And the tools are free.
 

Reziac

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If you have a Western Digital hard drive, you can download Acronis from WD's site for free. (It won't install unless there is at least one WD drive in the system.) Personally I don't care for it as it requires a working copy of Windows (not always available if you're trying to salvage a dying drive) and I figure if it's going to require Windows, it could be more selective than just doing a disk image. I don't know how good the images are; I assume they're just whatever Windows can see.

Conversely, Ghost can scrape data off bad sectors (which neither DOS nor Windows will read), tho it may take hours to do so. I recall once where I had to leave it running for DAYS, but it managed to pull every bit of data (with no loss or corruption) off a hard drive that had a serious case of the creeping crud. -- This was an old version of Ghost that runs from a DOS boot floppy. I don't know what the current one does. I see it requires Windows, so I doubt it can handle iffy disks.

A good starting point to look for alternatives is the DMOZ index:

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Backup/Disk_Copy/