On 1/8/07, smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
We barely have enough storage for user home directories so we have
standard Ghost images for 2 Dell laptop models and 4 Dell desktops, we
have app and settings diff files per dept, and our users all have
their home directories mapped with a couple of registry settings
changed to put some of their profile on to their home directory (we've
also used roaming profiles which are reliable but have their own
issues).
The harddrives in our Dell GX620s are dying at a rate of 2 or a day so
I've been going through the routine alot lately. I haven't kept track
but most of the bad batch of Maxtors should be replaced by now.
I get a new harddrive from Dell, put a CD in, boot, choose the correct
hardware and grab the correct image. 30 minutes later I run the
appropriate diff file, name the machine, and add it to AD. Let the
user login (if they don't know how to set up their email I do so) and
the login script takes care of printer mappings, etc. The only thing
the user is missing at this point is any special apps that they use.
Greg
