Imaging desktops using Ghost 2003 onto External Hard drive ?

[vrcatherine]

I am completely new to this hardware/software stuff correct me if i'm wrong.

Currently we have 20 desktops running windows 2000 pro/XP pro systems. And I am in the process of taking an image of all the drives in all the computers so that i can recover/restore them in an crash event.


I had gotten the Norton Ghost 2003 software, Maxtor 300GB external Hard drive.

I had hooked this External Hard drive to one of the server.

1) Now using this Ghost software can I take an image of
all the systems and put it in the external hard drive ?


2) In the event of a crash of an desktop can get back the
image from external hard drive and restore the desktop?
If yes how ?



--Thanks
Cathy

 

[Jump1ng]

Yes you can ghost pc's over the network using an additional disk that holds the proper drivers for the network card on the workstation.

This will let you store the image on your server disk.

You do however break your license agreement with Symantec when you use ghost on more than one machine as you are only allowed to make ghost copies of one machine.

We found that buying Symantec Ghost proffesional is cheaper as you save about £5 per license getting ghost proffesional. Also ghost proffesional is easier to ghost as once the client part is installed you can tell it to do a new ghost backup whenever you need to without having to go to the machine and find the disk with the right network driver on etc.

 

[vrcatherine]

Per machine license, I did not get it.

The Ghost 2003 what i got doesnt it work for all my workstations ?

 

[ricpinto]

Goto

http://www.powerquest.com

and choose one of the solution but it will cost you. You can download it for evaluation.

 

[ntinlin]

The ghost 2003 boot discs (create from Ghost Utilities)will only support certain USB devices. Although there are drivers on the net to make most USB devices work.

So basically to backup you'd plug in your external drive and use the boot disk to allow ghost to see it and create the image. I think you'd have to format external drive with FAT32 rather than NTFS though.

To restore just do the same again but choose restore.

Sorry, I misread your question. Use the boot disk creator to make a network boot disk as Jump1ing says.

Jump1ing is also correct in that you would need to buy a 2003 license for each machine you are backing up.

Slightly better option as ricpinto mentions is the Powerquest driveimage with V2i (now owned by Symantec) which allows you to do a backup from within windows to a network device, USB drive etc. Think it can be scheduled as well.

Neill