Comments on: Free disk cloning for Windows OS: Microsoft AIK and ImageX

By: Aggressive Prefector

Aggressive Prefector — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:10:52 +0000

At a place I worked we always used ghost. since about windows 95. Great thing with this was the ability to use CD burner. This means we could take a ghost backup everywhere.

Soon came XP and now the old ghost version was not as useful. The 2003 version of Ghost still fits on a Floppy yet has support for DVD burners. Because of windows XP large size and new programs large sizes we needed either more compression or bigger medium for storage. DVDs turned out fine.

Recently I tried the Ghost 9.0 and was disappointed to see the lack of floppy support. You could not backup a broken operation system. So i will stick with my old Ghost 2003 until Blue-Ray disks care cheep and I have to find a new program. Hopefully Linux will dominate the new OS markets and backups will easier.

By: Tom Yurchick

Tom Yurchick — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:30:45 +0000

I recently just started using Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net) an OSS imaging software similar to Ghost. The performance is about on par for AIK but the images do tend to be a bit larger, even with max compression, I’m seeing image sizes hovering around 5gig. I’ve also yet to have any issues with NIC or mass storage devices. All in all a very slick tool. Clonezilla can be used used via a multitude of ways, SMB shares, NFS shares, etc. This was the hardest part for me as I am rather unfamiliar with Linux so the “DRBL” environment was not used. I instead ran a Windows 2003 server running UNix services for Windows.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:10:50 +0000

You can make a tar archive with compression and then untar it onto a new hard drive to make a complete copy of the original. A perfect clone (block by block) can be made using the dd command. There’s also mondo/mindi for backups. You end up with isos on a server which you can burn to CD or DVD for a bare-metal backup/recovery option.

By: Rob Dunn

Rob Dunn — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:57:02 +0000

@Brian

That’s a shame, I’ve heard some good things about G4U (wasn’t that the one that would do multicasting?).

Out of curiousity, what solution did you end up with?

Regarding Linux Live-CDs, we have opted not to use them since we have a number of tools that run in a Win32 environment. So, Windows PE was the only viable solution for us.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:42:05 +0000

We used G4U, for several years as our sole imaging solution with about 2500 Windows PCs. I stopped using it last year because there’s such poor support in NetBSD for SATA & NIC drivers. We reached a point where G4U wouldn’t work on any newly purchased PCs. It’s a shame because we loved it while it worked. We finally switched to a commercial solution.

By: krillz

krillz — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:30:52 +0000

I would fo with linux for this, very easy to do just run a shellcode script and it’s done.

By: Rob Dunn

Rob Dunn — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:08:54 +0000

No, not running Windows, but you would create a bootable Windows PE (Pre installation Environment) disc and run the exe from there.

I’ve never used Linux Live-CD for this purpose. Anyone else?

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:37:28 +0000

You can’t do this stuff while running Windows, can you? How would a Linux live cd and tar (+bzip2) compare?