"This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with Ghost4Linux. Ghost4Linux is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally."
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Member since:2006-10-08
"Deoes it work with Windows/NTFS? I could use a free replacement for Ghost."
As far as I know, the usual "low level backup" (or image creation) techniques work with almost every file system or partition type, even with nonstandard stuff like "FAT" or "NTFS". You could use a combination of dd or dump, mkfifo, scp and / or mount -t nfs (NB: not "NTFS"!) to dump on a network storage facility. I have to admit that these "hacks" are not very comfortable and need some experience in using Linux / UNIX, but they should work under all circumstances. But I can't tell exactly if (and how) this is possible using G4L. The screenshots are nice, but there's not much evidence about how the backup process is working.
Member since:2007-01-12
The g4l uses dd as the primary copy process, and then uses lzop, gzip, or bzip to compress the image, and then uses ncftp for the transfer. It can also do local copies to Fat32 and ext2, ext3 partitions for image creation. The g4l bootcd does not have the ability to write to NTFS partitions thou NTFS write support is built in the kernel, but it doesn't allow writes. If you use the knoppix livecd and add g4l with the files4.gz, it can run the script, and it does support NTFS writes, but it is a 600+MB image. You can clone any partition to another, but it can only write image files to the basic partitions.
A recently version of the full script is available at:
ftp://amd64gcc.dyndns.org/g4l28
Member since:2007-01-12
It can copy FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, lvm, and probable any partition in the raw mode. It does use dd, so it includes programs that can be used to clear the unused sectors with nulls to greatly reduce the size of the images. In my labs, I have machines with 98, XP, and Linux partitions. I can image the entire drive, or individual partitions.
It also has NTFSCLONE added as recommended by an user, and can read and write to the ntfs partitions with it. I use it to create an image of the XP on the server in about 10 minutes, and can then restore it quickly.
Member since:
2006-11-01
Deoes it work with Windows/NTFS? I could use a free replacement for Ghost.