Pierre Posted November 8, 2003 Report Share Posted November 8, 2003 Has anybody successfully used new version Ghost Corporate 8.0 for partition backup/restore on Mandrake 9.1? According to the specs for Ghost 8.0 it should support ext3 file system but I have tried without success. Also have had a lenghty exchange of messages with Symantec support on the matter. Please have a look at this link: http://servicenews.symantec.com/cgi-bin/di...l&article=37065 After backup I resore and the system stalls with "Linux loading....." For some time I have been using Paragon Drive Backup 5.5 for successfully backing up and restoring, but wanted to check out this version of Ghost. Any comment will be appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted November 8, 2003 Report Share Posted November 8, 2003 As far as I know.. ghost is amazingly bad in supporting any linux partition, even something simple as ext2. I use Acronis True Image myself, and it is worth the money I spend for that package. It supports ext2, ext3, and reiserfs. Not only that, it support partition imaging directly to cds. Since I am a born experimenter, I usually backup my mdk partitions to cdrw before doing something crazy, like updating mandrake 9.1 to mandrake 9.2 for example. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bam Posted November 8, 2003 Report Share Posted November 8, 2003 (edited) I have to agree with DragonMage... I'm another born experimenter & use Acronis True Image to backup my system before I break it trying something new. It works like a champ on ext3 partitions. As a new user (been in linux less than a year) it has saved me a number of times. Nothing gives you more confidence to try new things than knowing you can have your "perfectly tweaked" system back up & running in about 10-15 minutes. In fact I'm about to give a second go to KDE 3.2 beta1 now that they have posted a Kcontrol bug fix. If I still can't get it to work..oh well...a quick run of True image & I'm back in business. If it still doesn't work, I might try installing Texstar's 3.13 from 9.1 since I loved the window shadows he patched in (lost them when I updated to 9.2). It's nice to have the safety net of True Image. Edited November 8, 2003 by Bam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pierre Posted November 8, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 8, 2003 Thanks everyone for input. Fully agree with the use of this type of software. I do backup after any new changes to the systems and can do all sorts of crazy things with files and registry without having to worry about ending up with non working systems. Have also stopped using any sort of antivirus software. If I get something bad it is quicker to restore an image than chasing after the virus. Have routinely done this for years with Windows of all versions. Still use Ghost (running in DOS) for this OS's. When I started using Linux one of my conditions for even trying was to find a working backup/restore program for this OS. Did not want to spend hours on reinstallations after I crippled the system doing something wrong. Eventually I found ParagonDriveBackup which has been working perfectly so far, but also wanted to try alternatives. Tried Acronis TrueImage without much success. Had some correspondence a while ago with the Acronis support people saying something about "Directory index (dir_index) is a new ext2/ext3" not being supported. After that I stopped trying. I think you all should try Paragon. Regarding Ghost 8.0 I finally got a restore to work but first I had to use MDK CD1 to rescue and rewrite the bootloader Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BertoldK Posted November 8, 2003 Report Share Posted November 8, 2003 Just wondering, and perhaps a bit a stupid question: what about using tar? And what are the differences between Ghost / Paragon / Acronis compared to tar? (Must admit: never used tar for backup) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
computerlove Posted November 9, 2003 Report Share Posted November 9, 2003 (edited) Perhaps I can share my successful experience in using Ghost to restore Mandrake 9.1 in my harddisk. First of all, my harddisk is installed with WinXP and Mandrake 9.1. WinXP is in my first partition and Mandrake 9.1 in my second and so on parititions. I installed Grub in my MBR to multiboot WinXP and Mandrake. After restore Mandrake in my harddisk using Ghost, it will load Grub but halt immediately. What I need to do is to use a Mandrake floppy boot disk to load the Mandrake, login as root and run the install Grub script in /boot/grub directory (of course you need to change it to 700 before it can be executed). Everything should work fine then! :P Edited November 9, 2003 by computerlove Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pierre Posted November 11, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 (edited) Ghost 8.0 now works 50/50 which means after a restore I have to run the installation CD to restore LILO. No such problems with Paragon Drive Backup. Works 100%. Little bit slower to backup than Ghost but the image files are a little bit smaller.Time to restore faster with Paragon. Max compression for both programs used. Edited November 11, 2003 by Pierre Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EvolutionXtinct Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 How much for these types of programs and whats the site :) EvoX Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 Acronis True Image was about $50 last time I checked. But there is an excellent free program called partimage which I'm surprised no one has mentioned. Here's a link discussing several options with follow up links to sources: http://www.desktop-linux.net/backups.htm Acronis is great but has two limitations. The initial install must be on windows; after that you can make a bootable cd to run the program. Also, when writing the image to a hard drive, Acronis can only write to FAT32 partitions. The great Acronis feature mentioned above is it can write to cd-r or cd-rw and span multiple cds. That's what I primarily use it for. Acronis is probably the most user friendly imaging software I've ever used. For partimage, download the rescue cd iso image from their website and follow the instructions on the above link. It can write to any type of hard drive partition and supports all common linux filesystems as well as FAT32, but NTFS is experimental although I've heard that works well too. It's not nearly as user friendly as Acronis and requires some linux knowledge. It's biggest limitation is that you cannot image a mounted partition so there's no point installing it on your linux system since you won't be able to back it up if it's running; that's why I recommended the rescue cd option. Partimage is also included on the knopix cd and can be run from knoppix in a terminal. I've also used Drive Image from the Partition Magic folks but its linux support is very poor and it can only image ext2 partitions, and not very well at that. With all of the above, I sometimes get boot loader errors after restoring a partition, but that is easily corrected by restoring the boot loader using the mandrake install cd-1 in rescue mode. You should be familiar with how to do this before attempting to restore a partition with any imaging software. It's not a big deal. You just boot off the install cd, hit F1 when you see the inital screen and type "rescue" at the prompt. That takes you to a menu with one of the options being reinstalling your boot loader. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pierre Posted November 12, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 Tried True Image fron Acronis as well. However the only advantage I see with this program is that after you made the boot CD it can be used on any system. The disadvantage is that it is much slower than both Ghost and Paragon and the image sizes are huge compared tho images made by the other programs. Made an image of a /home partition (size 400 MB) with only about 50 MB used and the image size was close to 400 MB!!! At full compression.Same partion image with Ghost and Paragon was about 3 MB. If you have a small DOS partition Paragon is the way to go, with Ghost as second choice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 Now that is surprising.. what kind of filesystem do you use for your /home partition? I mean, I backed up my whole mandrake hd (30 gig) with 3 gigs used for /, 1 gig used for swap and 200 meg used for /home. All that took only 2x700mb cdrws. I had a feeling that your /home partition is a bit corrupted, thus acronis decide to do a sector by sector backup instead of regular compressed backup. Ext3 seems to have this problem with acronis, even after fscking it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 (edited) I noticed the same thing as DragonMage with Acronis and ext3 partitions. In fact, that's why I started using partimage. I have multiple linux distros installed with partimage on each of them so I can image one distro from within another. When running from within a linux distro on the hard drive, I typically get transfer rates of 400MB/min and 2 to 1 compression. Nothing I've tried seems to restore faster than partimage with rates typically exceeding 1GB/min. Off the partimage rescue cd, image writing rates are much slower, usually around 200MB/min with restore rates under 300MB/min. This is mostly due to dma not being enabled on the rescue cd. I'm sure if I fiddled around with it, I could get it enabled; just never bothered since I have no need to do so. Apart from the ext3 problem in Acronis, its write speeds are very fast, over 500MB/min but it's restore speed is slower than partimage, usually around 800MB/min. Obviously, you have much slower times when writing to cd-rs, the limiting factor being the write speed of your burner. The same holds true when restoring from a cd. I use reiserfs exclusively now and have never run into any problems with Acronis. Edited November 13, 2003 by pmpatrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pierre Posted November 13, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 13, 2003 (edited) First a slight correction to my previous post. Of course both Ghost and Paragaon DB runs from floppies, however you need DOS partions either on your HDD or on your network to save the images. I kind of forgot as I have extracted the files from the floppies and run the programs from my DOS partition. As per comments made by DragonMage and pmpatrick TrueImage seems to have difficulties with ext3 partitions. My /home partition is ext3 and it appears that TrueImage only manages sector by sector backup. As far as I know the partitions are not corrupted, works fine and all log off and kill processes is all OK. Paragon DB doesn't seem to have any problems with the filesystem. Just backed up my / and /home partitions with Paragon DB / Size: 5.7 GB Used: 2.1 GB Image Size: 800 MB /home Size: 1.0 GB Used: 0.3 GB Image Size: 100 MB Edited November 13, 2003 by Pierre Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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