ghost sucks. other alternatives?

theMonster

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• Feb 20, 2005

• #1

I *obtained* Ghost 9.0 recently and am not happy with it. It only compresses 50% at max and therefore with the 40GB of data I have it only compressed to 20GB and would have to span 5 DVDs. This is no good for me. Does anybody know of some other hard drive imaging software with better compression that would take up maybe just 1 DVD or 2 at the most?

 

jchsatx09

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Jan 19, 2005

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Texas

• Feb 20, 2005

• #2

Acronis True Image 8.0

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Much better than Ghost

 

OP

theMonster

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• Feb 20, 2005

• Thread Starter
• #3

Thanks, I'll check out the trial edition. Any others?

 

jabaro

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• Feb 21, 2005

• #4

I had the same question a while back. Everyone said Acronis True Image 8.0. I haven't used it though.

 

thegreek

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• Feb 21, 2005

• #5

ghost is one of the best one's... did you go into the setting and change the default compression to MAX?

Also, what are you compressing....music...videos? Those things take LOTS of space since they cannot be compressed any more than what they are. I suggest backup up all your music and videos on DVD and use ghost to backup your main OS installation with updates and your programs installed.

For example, I did a clean install of XP, installed all drivers, installed all my programs, updated everything and then used Ghost to backup 4 GB onto 1 CD.

 

OP

theMonster

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• Feb 21, 2005

• Thread Starter
• #6

I'm using it to backup my whole hard drive and there is about 10GB of video from my vidcam and 8-9GB of music for the Ipod. I did use max compression, but just found that it wasn't enough. I downloaded the Acronis trial and am about to test it out.

 

OP

theMonster

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• Feb 21, 2005

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• #7

Well, Acronis does look better and after deleting some nneeded stuff I only had 30GB to backup, but again Ghost would only compress to 20GB and Acronis would compress 40 14.5 which is still 3 DVDs so I'm not sure there is a good solution for what I want to do then

 

Slackfumasta

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• Feb 21, 2005

• #8

Data can only be compressed so much you know.

If you need to have your image file hosted on a single volume, consider buying an external USB hard drive. I have one at work that I use to store multiple images for the different models of PCs we have. I plug it in to the USB port, tell the computer to boot from USB, and it then boots to DOS on the hard drive. Then I run Ghost, select which image I want, and restore it to the computer. Works well, though USB is considerably slower than disk. It takes me about 1-1.5 hours to restore a 6-9 GB image file.

 

XunknownX

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• Feb 21, 2005

• #9

Partition the drive. Put video/music and what not on the partition not containing your OS. Then make a drive image of the OS partition which should easily fit onto one dvdr unless you have a lot of games installed.

 

alinosa

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San Antonio, TX

• Feb 21, 2005

• #10

i use drive image. and what thegreek said is true: music and video are not going to compress any more. they already are compressed. i moved my "my documents" folder (which has all my music, videos and other media junk) off of my main drive. It resides on a ide 80 gig, while my OS, games and other "fast" software all live on my RAID array. when i image my OS drive, it gets saved to "my documents" also. this keeps my DVD usage down.

 

TollhouseFrank

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• Feb 21, 2005

• #11

yeah.... out of those 20 gigs in ghost... i'd say 85% of it is your music and video. having used Ghost MANY times... i can say that I know it will take 8-10 gigs and on average, make it fit on at most 3 cd's... or 1 dvd. However, that was WITHOUT music and videos. that was just normal OS, programs, word files, etc.

 

OP

theMonster

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• Feb 21, 2005

• Thread Starter
• #12

I gave up. I got ghost for *"free"* but I can easily get another hard drive for image hosting or cloning for cheaper than I could actually buy ghost or acronis for and then problem solved. I was just looking for a cheap and lazy way out.

 

V

veryhumid

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• Feb 24, 2005

• #13

i think ghost sucks, too. It does the backup just fine, and I have successfully restored from a backup, but a have a couple beefs: can't pick write speed for cd or dvd drive, and all the time when it is done, there is a service that just keeps hogging cpu cycles and won't stop until you reboot. doing some searches it seems like there are lots of little bugs like this. I'll definitely check out the acronis. good post, but i's say this belongs in the microsoft section.