>
> Your description of ghost makes me a bit nervous. I conjecture from it
> that ghost backs up partitions as disk images, not file by
> file. This has
> two problems.
Ghost can back up partitions or entire disks as images.
>
> 1) Since a partition image is backed up, it backs up empty
> blocks as well
> as useful data, making the backup larger than necessary.
>
For partition types that Ghost understands (like FAT16, FAT32, and possibly
ext2), Ghost ignores all empty blocks. Because it understands the
underlying FS, it can resize partitions on the fly while restoring. For
example, I back up data acquisition systems here for the purpose of making
them all identical. The source machine might have a 2.1GB drive. The
destination machine might be 1GB or 6GB. Ghost doesn't care, as long as the
actual data can fit in the new drive.
> 2) It is not possible to extract individual files from a
> backup, making it
> impossible to revert a portion of a file system to a prior
> date. Restoring
> individual files is a fairly common request.
>
At least for FAT16/32 (my experience with Ghost) they provide a utility very
similar to File Manager that will mount a Ghost volume in Windows and let
you ADD and REMOVE files from the image. Very powerful, at least for
Windows. Whether any such capability exists for ext2, I don't know.
>
> Tape is not entirely obsolete. 40 GB on a DDS 3 tape occupies
> a lot less
> volume and is more mechanically robust than 40 GB on a hard drive.
>
Unfortunately, tape is NOT keeping up with drive capacities. I can buy a
60GB Maxtor drive for $250. Please tell me how much must I spend for a tape
drive with that capacity? How much will the tapes cost me? How dang slow
is that tape drive compared to a "lowly" IDE drive? Don't get me wrong. I
think tape has it's place. However, the reality is that tape is becoming a
dinosaur in the land of hard drive "mammals". It's kind of pathetic that a
tape backup solution can cost 10x the hard drive it's protecting.
Matthew
"Hoping that this email actually reaches the list"
