On Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:00:48 +1100, Rod.. Whitworth wrote > 1>For me it was a one-off base install of OS+apps and lots of empty. > 2>I don't have Ghost. It costs $ even if never needed. In fact more > than the IBM recovery CD. > 3>We don't expect to reinstall often. > 4> I don't have a samba server. G4U used an OpenBSD ftpd. Easy.
> Frankly I don't want to waste my time doing an investigation to find > better methods. The savings due to finding something that works twice > as fast are a net loss. > > No offense taken from your post, none intended in reply. > Go well..... > R/ No offense taken, I'm merely stating my experience if it helps in decision making. The original post didn't give a lot of details so I assumed an IT professional type situation. Don't get me wrong I like g4u and wish I could use it with nothing but an OpenBSD ftp server. I like that kind of simplicity. For home it's a great choice. My advice is more for people in a IT (information technology) professional situation who must do backups all the time for windows. This includes building or rebuilding windows boxes constantly. In this situation, money for a single user license of ghost is inconsequential. If your business can't afford $70, they are probably paying you a salary that's way below your market value. If you're doing a lot of pc's, it is worth the time to look at other solutions than g4u. One of the problems I have with g4u was I couldn't find a hard drive big enough to contain all the 40+ gig images I had for each motherboard. Nulling the empty space was time consuming but necessary if I want to save space on the server (but still the images were huge). Transferring an image to the server took hours whereas samba+ghost+netbootdisk.com took half an hour in most cases. If you create an image with g4u of a 40 gig hard drive and put it on a 80 gig hard drive you also have to go back run partimage (i.e. from Knoppix) to resize the partition to get the full 80 gigs. Again another time waster if you're doing this a lot. In my experience I have never found a decent backup solution for windows (as a workstation or personal computer) other than to image it whether that be with ghost or g4u or whatever. Best practices would be that the users save all business information on the server. Backing up everyone's c:\winnt and c:\program files and c:\my documents and settings is a huge waste of disk space and frought with errors due to file locks and profile corruptions. No offense taken, I'm merely pointing out to those who read this post trying to look for an IT solution. If I had know the details you posted above I probably would have never said anything.
