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Spencer Smith
spencera@oregon.uoregon.edu
Anyone who has ever lost a paper, dissertation, take-home exam, or any other
important file knows that backing up your hard drive is a must. At some point,
your computer can--and will--die, taking all your hard work and
data files with it. Recovering your files from a crashed hard drive is always
tedious, often frustrating, and sometimes impossible. Once the hard drive has
crashed, it often needs to be replaced, and all the applications, programs,
settings, and files must be reinstalled from scratch.
Symantec's Norton Ghost makes recovering from these catastrophic crashes easy
and complete. All data, including user settings, installed applications, and
files can be quickly and easily restored. Ghost creates an image of your entire
drive or partition and writes that to a variety of storage media. Support for
Zip disks, Jaz drives, CD-R drives, and other large-capacity storage media is
built into the program.
You can also back up your drive to another internal drive or partition. (You
could conceivably store your Ghost image to multiple floppy disks, but with
modern operating systems alone taking up 1.5GB of storage space, you'd need
a wheelbarrow for all the floppies necessary to create a backup on floppies.)
Compression. You have a choice of three levels of compression listed
for the backup: None, Fast, and Small. With no compression, the Ghost image
will take up the same amount of space as the used portions of the target drive,
and the recovery is relatively quick. Creating a small, more compressed Ghost
image will yield some space savings, but will increase both the time to create
the image and the time to recover the volume. The amount of space saved depends
on the predominant type of files being backed up. Applications and other binary
data don't compress well, and may actually increase the size overall due to
the overhead involved in compression.
Caveats. Before you start, be aware that there are a few caveats involved
in creating a Ghost image. Ghost works from a DOS shell and is limited to the
kind of things DOS can do. For example, NTFS is not supported in the consumer-level
version because it's not accessible from DOS. External USB and Firewire media
are likewise not supported.
Step 1: Create a floppy. The first order of business is creating a Ghost
boot floppy. All Ghost's operations are done from a booted floppy disk, running
either PC-DOS or MS-DOS (if you have MS-DOS disks available). You can choose
to include CD-RW support, peer-to-peer networking support, and various other
drivers. (The peer-to-peer networking support does work, but this article will
concentrate on the local drive options.) Pick your options in the BootWizard
application and allow it to create the boot floppy.
Step 2: Secure your backup media. If you're going to use CD-R disks,
you'll need to divide the total used capacity of your hard drive by 650MB, then
buy that number of CD-Rs to hold the disk image. Another good option is to buy
a second hard drive that's large enough to hold the used portion of your drive.
IDE hard drives are relatively inexpensive these days, and a full backup on
demand, inside your computer, can be invaluable. A 20GB IDE drive currently
sells for less than $100, and should be adequate for an internal backup.
Step 3: Start the backup. Once your media is ready, you're all set for
the backup. Boot from the Ghost floppy you've created and allow the Ghost program
to boot. It will spend some time loading drivers for your mouse and keyboard
and then look for CD-R drives and other devices.
At the Ghost interface, select "Local," then "Disk"
(or "Partition," if your C: drive is a partition on a larger disk
with multiple partitions) from the resulting pop-up window, then "To
Image." A dialog box will appear, asking for the source disk or partition.
Select the volume you want to back up. You'll see a "Save Filename"
dialog that lists all your connected drives. Select your CD-R drive from the
list. There is also an option to add a floppy disk image to the CD-R backup.
Adding this floppy image allows you to boot from the backup CD without needing
a floppy disk--a very handy feature.
Once you select the target CD-R drive, you'll be given an option to compress
the image file. If you have a large amount of data on the drive, compression
can help lower the number of CDs necessary for the backup. Backing up with no
compression can speed your recovery later, though. I generally choose the "Fast"
compression option; this saves some space, and is relatively quick to restore.
Once you've made these selections, insert your CD-R media into the drive and
allow Ghost to copy your data. A volume with 1.5GB of data took me 15 minutes
to back up on a 8x Plextor CD-R drive--about what you'd expect from an
8x CD burner.
To restore from your backup CD set, simply boot from the Ghost floppy again (or from the first CD-ROM you created, if you chose to add the floppy image to your CD), and select Local-> Image->Disk(or Partition). You'll then be able to select your CD set as the source, your disk as the destination, and restore your disk to the exact configuration that you backed up using Ghost.