I know Ghost does do compression but I don't know how that's done. Actually, you can select either no compression, fast compression or high compression so its probably got several different algorithms it uses. However, you are right even when you select the high compression option be prepared for some large images. We recently allocated 200GB on our san just for ghost images. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G. Heim Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:52 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers Hmmmm... Are you figuring ghost is analysing the file system so that it doesn't include empty disk space in the image? Maybe. I wouldn't count on it though. I think it's more llikely that ghost compresses the image as it's being created. I am not the Windows guy in my department and I don't have any experience with ghost. But I do know those ghost images are not that small. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent Harding" <bharding@doorpi.net> To: "Blind sysadmins list" <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:29 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers
Ah, should've been a little more clear on what I was asking. I'm sure the linux live Ubuntu CD would probably work just fine, dd'ing my windows partition, but with this ghost thing where you use another machine as a server, how does the other box that I want restored know to do so when I tell the server box I want it done? Is this something that probably wouldn't work on home machines where there is no network boot? It would seem like this would be a better way if possible because just using DD from a linux disk would mean that if I was backing up a 300 gig drive, I have to use 300 gigs on the destination even if it was basically a fresh install of Windows with JFW and the proper drivers on it and ready to go even though there'd be lots of empty space in that file.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" <number6@speakeasy.net> To: "Blind sysadmins list" <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 3:37 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers
Hi, Brent:
On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:52:49 -0600, you wrote:
How would something like that ever work for completely reinstalling when that time comes? How could it make any given machine reboot and start reimaging?
Most Linuxes (Linuces?) are so non-machine-specific as to be able to boot a kernel containing enough of the base code to run very basic things. Among those basic things, Linux--most of them, anyway--includes code for reading and writing just about any kind of disk or reading/writing any kind of partition on a disk no matter what its type (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Most popular Linuxes now have speech, some even built-in off the shelf, so you can boot a CD or a USB drive and have the thing come up talking. You then mount the thing you want to restore (or back up) as a file system (which is kind of an odd way of saying it's a disk even if it isn't, if you're not into how Linux handles devices and files) and you do your thing. To Linux, everything's a file, whether it's your keyboard, your monitor, or an NTFS partition on a multi-terabyte RAID array, it's all the same to Linux. Internal to each file system are objects called nodes, which in Windows parlance is akin to a file in a volume table of contents (VTOC). The code that knows, or cares, about whether the so-called file is really a hardware device is known as a device driver. The coupling between all these elements is so tight as to be seamless from end to end. So when you mount a partition on a disk, Linux doesn't much care what it is, as long as you have the tools to manipulate whatever *you* think it should be. In the case of the dd utility, it treats the partition as one big file, reading all the sector data and writing it to a file that, for all intents and purposes, looks just like the data that makes it up, with a little additional data probably at the beginning and end to identify it as a package containing other things. It's a snapshot frozen in time stored in the image file. Whhen you need it again, you simply run dd in the opposite direction and a suitably created partition on some hardware device will contain an exact copy, sector for sector, byte for byte, as the old partition did.
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