So I need to keep an archive of machine images on physical media. DVD or dual layer DVD is the medium of choice at the moment. I need a way to backup these machines to this media such that only the media and no other disk is needed to recover the machine. My concerns are cost and speed. Speed is the most important (in terms of writing directly to disk and writing back to hard drive from disk). I was planning on using ghost, creating a .GHO image on an external hard drive, then burning the .GHO file to a dvd with ghost.exe on the disk and just burning the dvd with some form of bootable floppy emulation in nero or the like. Is there a slicker/faster solution?

4/16/2008 6:22:08 PM

Acronis

4/16/2008 6:44:59 PM

wow, so much information

4/16/2008 7:21:05 PM

haha short and simple

4/17/2008 1:32:56 AM

^^ Read up on Acronis and you'll see that he said all that he needed to.

4/17/2008 1:43:48 AM

i'd go with acronis.

4/17/2008 1:45:32 AM

acronis true image

4/17/2008 9:15:07 AM

anyone care to point out the advantages over ghost? ghost is practically free (you can buy a $5 copy of systemworks 2004 and get ghost 2003)

4/17/2008 11:04:18 AM

acronis is also practically "free", but you didn't hear that from me

4/17/2008 12:05:32 PM

^^ but ghost pales in comparison to acronis true image, especially for the home user.
^ agreed, but i didnt say it either

4/17/2008 1:52:19 PM

this will not be for home use, I need to do this to several hundred, possibly thousands of machines. I'm more looking for a time benchmark between the 2 and feature set secondarily.

4/18/2008 11:02:09 AM

in my experience at work:

for batch imaging jobs (as in, multicast), ghost seems to be faster. i actually like imagecast a little better though.

http://www.appdeploy.com/tools/detail.asp?id=95

ghost is faster than imagecast, but imagecast is much easier to manage/configure, especially for multicasts

for one-offs, i like acronis.

4/18/2008 12:14:17 PM

ghost enterprise can burn images directly to CD/DVD

4/18/2008 1:11:37 PM

my question with ghost, is do you need a bootdisk for these images or can ghost create a bootable restore dvd? if I didnt have to fuck with it and could just produce a restore dvd I would be ecstatic. all I'd need is a version of ghost that supported that as well as usb dual layer dvd support.

4/19/2008 12:50:43 AM