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A good Drive Imaging Ghost alternative

I just found this email today - never did blog it.  So here it is from about 8 months ago and is the reason SRD is an essentual part of my toolkit (I'm sure SystemRecueDisk is a lot better now)

Email with performance test follows:

Since we discussed this the other day - Ghost licencing is ridiculous these

days, and the open source alternative is too S-L-O-W, I did somd
digging/testing:
PowerQuest DriveImager (that I used to use as @ SID) has been bought by
Symantec - and now has almost exactly the same licencing. (how many machines

will you use it on - hopless for a "roving techie")

I burnt a copy of SystemRescueCD and am very impressed.   I booted up (in fb

mode), tried Links in graphical form, qtparted (very nice - will resize NTFS

partitions _safely_)  Very nice - nothing to congfigure when booting (unless

you want to specify 1024/768 fb mode for example, instead of 800x600 fb).
You can optionally have the entire fs load to RAM so you can load other CDs

into the system.   Will boot of USB too if you like that sort of thing

Then I mounted a windows share to another machine here using samba, and
fired up  partimage

Very easy to use, (HEAPS easier than ghost) tells you that NTFS support is
experimental.   What does this mean?   According to the web site, some
partitions may not image (mostly due to corrupted partitions, actually;
recomended to defrag before imaging - I do this anyway when ghosting. If
the image gets created it will be fine.   This is because they are very
perdantic - along with tools that qtparted uses - in building a fully bug
free NTFS implementation that has no relation to the NTFS driver thats been

in linux kernel for a few years)  Essentially I am less worried about this
screwing up an NTFS partition than my own experience with PQDI for example.

Test Results:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Imaged Partition:
   40GB / 4.05GB of data on it
   XP NTFS partition
Test Machine:
    1.3 AMD Duron with 512 DDR @ 333MHz

GZipped Image file - broken into 650MB files (which actually came in as
between 636MB and 666MB like ghost does:
CREATION:
    Speed:  152 MB/min == 2.53MB/s
    Time: 27m16s
    Total Image Size:  2.35 GB ( 4 CDs )
RESTORE:
    Speed: 429.62 MB/min == 7.16MB/s
    Time: 9m39s

Raw Image file (why would you - though it is faster)
CREATION:
    Speed: 290MB/min == 4.83MB/s
    Time: 14m15s

BZIP Image
   Don`t bother - estimated 1h15m @ 50 MB/min == 0.8MB/s
Which is what you`ld expect really - only did this to be complete.   Also
there is a bug with this that means there is a little extra work if you need
to restore the MBR.

I personally think an easy to use spanning system, no licence hassles, and a

9 and a half minute image restore time is a worthy replacement.   Images can

have comments, too, btw - also like ghost.

Cheers,
Mathew

(oh yeah - if you are interested, this was an email I sent to Hilton at Quark IT (http://www.quarkit.com.au) really switched on guy)

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