Norton Ghost and MS .NET Framework

Daniel

A lot of newer programs are written with .NET extensions or with Visual Studio .NET. As a Beta tester of Visual Studio 2005 at work, trust me on this: it will only get worse!

Have you considered the newer generation of Firewire 800 external hard drives? I have one at work and it seems fast and reliable. At home I use a Sony DVD internal drive and Nero to backup to either single layer or dual layer DVD discs.

I'm just in for the day, as I had a luncheon and golf event to attend this afternoon. I'm getting ready to leave for the hobby farm, and should be back the third week of July. If you have any further questions please feel free to PM me, or use my personal or work email.

jay

 

So flush the MS garbage entirely, or if you must run it for certain
apps keep all your important user data under a particular tree and
tar that off over the net to a unix box where you can actually
manage it intelligently. Unless you take a raw disk image copy
of the MS box in a minimal environment, things like registry settings
never get backed up anyways so either way you're stuck reconfiguring
all your apps. If vendors who have knuckled under to the MS game
ever smartened up and started moving configuration info back into
simple, back-up-able flat text files like they should have never
stopped doing, you'd have a chance of saving all those too. You
may be able to come up with some creative hive subtrees to save
out before running your backup, but it'll be tedious to find it all.
.
_H*

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Jun 25 2006, 06:55 PM) [snapback]276631[/snapback]</div>

Norton Ghost is a piece of crap, get the refund before it wrecks something in your computer. Replace it with Acronis TrueImage. It's WAYYYYYY better. Ghost is one of the worst pieces of software that has ever infested my PC. Linux is still a command line OS and unless you're in to that kind of thing it's difficult to deal with, even though the GUI has improved drastically in the past year. Mac is actually better than Windoze; it just seems difficult because you're used to the masochistic way that microsoft makes you do things. You have to unlearn a lot that windows has forced upon your intellect before you can enjoy doing things the simple way that Macs are famous for.

TrueImage is also $20 cheaper than Ghost and it's a lot simpler to use.
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/produ...CFRC-IgodZDeYQw

 

Daniel,
First off, you made a wise choice with Ghost. Peace of mind is what you get, cause you know you are going to be able to restore an entire partition without having to load an OS first, then your backup software. So, if you have to replace your drive, you are already a step ahead of any backup programs.
With this in mind, you'll want to make a bootable CD that contains Ghost. Since Ghost is a low level DOS type program, even if you install/run it in Windows, it will just build a script with your commands, then boot into DOS and run them. So, long story short, you don't need to install Ghost to make it work, and therefore you don't have to use .NET. (Problem solved)

If you need some help setting up a bootable Ghost CD just let me know. I could send you an ISO

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(JackDodge @ Jun 25 2006, 07:54 PM) [snapback]276696[/snapback]</div>

How were you using it? Of course, referring to the OS as "Windoze" does reveal other issues.

I've been taking advantage of Ghost for years. It's sweet! Being able to create & restore an image is painless and surprisingly fast.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(john1701a @ Jun 25 2006, 09:21 PM) [snapback]276704[/snapback]</div>

I'm glad that you're happy with ghost but I'm not interested in debating the issue or on getting sold on Norton. They had their chance. I replaced it with TrueImage over a year ago and have NO intention of ever going back.

 

We all have opinions on the "best", easiest, or most cost effective backup solutions.

I use VMWare on top of an XP host, and run my actual XP as a session. This way XP is actually a file or folder and can be relocated or moved as such. VMWare is now a free download. I can also run, if I so choose, linux, Netware, DOS, or other versions of windows as I have memory and space for.

I use Symantec Live State Recovery for internal backup as it is basically Ghost on steroids, fully automated, and with the "recover anywhere" option I can make a recovery to dis-similiar hardware with an ISO.

For off site, all I use is a program called Backup Assist, which uses the native NT backup format. I do this because proprietary formats make backup recovery far more sifficult and usually far more expensive in the event of a catostrophic loss.

All I use Bakup Assist for is to backup the image file created by LSR. This way I have no problems with open files. In my opinion, a REV drive is the best balance of speed, redundancy, and reliability for simple backup to be removed from site on a daily basis. It is much faster that tape, more reliable than zip, larger than CD/DVD, and very portable and small.

This obviously will not work in a larger enterprise environment but works quite well in most very small business or home market.

Think of it this way...

My system is fully backed up to an image every night. During the day I run incrementals every two hours. With LSR there are no open file problems so everything gets backed up without my having to do anything. After the nightly LSR backup, another backup is made to the REV via Backup Assist and stored at a different location.

Because of the VMWare, if my computer "explodes", I can go to a big box store, buy anything with enough memory and hard drive, and do a complete recovery in about two hours.

 

Tried to post this yesterday, but Priuschat was down again.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Jun 25 2006, 03:55 PM) [snapback]276631[/snapback]</div>

Why don't you put a packet sniffer on the line so you can be sure your software isn't calling back home?

I use PowerQuest's (now bought by Symantec and part of Ghost now?) DiskImage for system drive backups. Could even try Veritas's Netbackup (recently also purchased by Symantec).

Most modern computer motherboards support SATA or PATA raid 1. If you're just worried about drive failure, then the enterprise solution is to keep your drives setup in a raid 1 (mirror) configuration where you're constantly writing to two drives and reading from both. If one drive fails, it'll warn you and continue using the other one.

If you're worried about just having backups of your data, then a large external usb drive and then one of the available drive imaging utilities from http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/drive_image.html or Ghost could be a solution.

I use g4u where I get some of the benefits of Ghost without having to deal with DOS, or paying for Symantec spyware. It made my recent cloning of of my drive from a 7 year old scsi drive to a newer one hassle free compared to Ghost 9, Partition Magic, Drive Image, etc...

I guess you really haven't been around. Norton of today isn't as trushworthy as it was 10 years ago when it was made by people (Norton) who wanted to improve your computing experience. Instead, it's now under the multi-software auspices of Symantec with their near Sony-like calls-home-and-hides-system-files registration system, and Symantec's dilution of feature improvement. Do we really need MS Office-like yearly updates of Systemworks that really don't improve upon much? It's like the second coming of Microsoft.

MacOS is is probably the most user-friendly version of unix (BSD) to date.

Having programmed through quite a bit of WIN32 lately, .NET is just another "language" framework and API giving a language abstraction to program against amid the myriad of APIs available for MicrosoftOS. It supposedly has a more modern engine core than the rest that were built up over the years and so it is more secure against exploits such as buffer overruns. Because it's compiled and interpreted each time you use it (like Java, or Python) instead of being prebuilt from the developer, you stand to gain every time the .NET framework upgrades.

.NET offers runtime checking of code to make sure it's not doing something illegal (like Javascript), but that's only a simplistic guarantee.

It really boils down to lazy programmers. There's no reason to use .NET unless the developer is lazy or wants a smaller, less error prone program. .NET makes it easier to do things to talk to the OS without having to write as much custom glue code as before. Like Java, it hides all the code that does the real work in an external framework and that's what you're downloading it for, but being interpreted, it is slower than native compiled code.

If you really were paranoid, you would just stop using Microsoft products. Stuff like Outlook (aka Lookout), programs that allow remote execution of code (ActiveX, IE, email), or the OS itself with a proven swiss-cheese record for security. Otherwise, I just see it as another sign of how far Norton software has fallen under the Symantec, and try some other solutions. Too bad the best alternative I could think of was also bought by Symantec (PowerQuest's Drive Image).

.NET is to Microsoft what Cocoa is to the Mac, generally.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Jun 26 2006, 06:49 PM) [snapback]277025[/snapback]</div>

There's nothing paranoid about it; just common sense. I have an external drive and backup my entire computer on to it with TrueImage using firewire. I then disconnect the external completely and put it in it's little cubbyhole for safekeeping. It's then protected from power surges as well as potential security breach.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Jun 25 2006, 04:55 PM) [snapback]276631[/snapback]</div>

Great Choice!

Yesterday, my 5-year-old hard-drive (yes, the one responsible for almost my entire website) finally died from extreme age (I beat the tar out of the thing). It was a spectacular crush... quite dramatic.

Anywho, a day later, I'm back up and running as if nothing happened. My GHOST image was recent enough so only the most recent file changes were lost. And most of those I was able to recover using my external hard-drive and website.

And of course, there's the benefit of this new hard-drive being bigger & faster. Norton's software simply allowed me to restore the image on it. No big deal. Pretty painless.

 

MY only issue with Ghost 10 was when it demanded Frameworks 1.1 even though I had 2.0 installed. Still haven't tried again to see if that was a fluke.

Ghost refused to back up one of my partitions, but that led to the realization that the hard disk was dying and it ended up in the trash. The replacement disk has been backed up correctly ever since.

I don't like how Symantec told me Ghost 10 would handle backups made with Ghost 2003, then it DIDN'T. They included a copy of 2003 in the box to do that, but my Core 2 Duo can't run 2003 so I ended up using my cartridge drive in a machine that still runs 2003 to get the disk restored. If Ghost 10 hadn't been free after rebate, I'd have written to complain.

BTW, if your machine takes SATA drives, like 99% of new machines do, Vantec http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817392002 has an external enclosure that includes an eSATA connector. You plug the cable into the motherboard, then place the connector in an open slotcover, and use the drive. I've got a 500GB one now and that takes care of my backup problems for the moment...

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(mikepaul @ Jan 26 2007, 09:43 AM) [snapback]381057[/snapback]</div>

If you have a Symantec product and you speak Hindu, you will have no problems with customer support. Symantec's one company that is totally on board with having a company in India do all of its customer contact work. I still think that Ghost is a POS. True Image is so much easier and more reliable.