Clone/ghost software

AlphaTrinity

Hey IC,

I wanted your opinions on a good hard drive cloning software that does the following pretty easily:

1) Much like Norton Ghost, can boot and allow you to choose what drive/partition you are cloning and to what device you want to save the image on. It would be great if the software could see flash drives and external hard drives (such as the WD Passport).

2) Unlike Norton Ghost, but like a Bart PE Self Image execution or an Acronis execution, the software has no problems with cloning RAID configurations, specifically RAID 1 and RAID 10.

3) Unlike Acronis, is affordable.


We've been using ghost for a long time for our desktops, and will probably continue to use ghost for them. The problem is that we have difficulty backing up the images of our servers because ghost is not the greatest when it comes to cloning RAID configurations. After a pretty chaotic server hardware failure that occurred today, we realized that we really need to get on backing up all of our servers. At first we thought that we would boot into a Bart PE utility disc and use Self Image (I think that's what it was called) to image our drives, but Bart PE turned out to be very slow, too slow for our level of patience. Then I tried Acronis that we were borrowing from somebody, and I was amazed at how easy it was to image the drive I wanted. Then when I found out that to legally use Acronis it cost $600 per server, I didn't think that would go over well with the budget folks.

What would be great is if there were someway to get Self Image/Bart PE to run without it taking 20 minutes just to get to the point where we can begin cloning the image or deploying the image. I know there are ways to shrink Bart PE discs, and the one I was using was pretty bloated, but I hear it's a pretty decent headache to do that.

So yeah, that probably wasn't all worth reading.
I just wanted to know what experiences you all had with simple yet efficient cloning software. Like I said, Ghost meets our needs, but we haven't had any luck with cloning RAID Array drives.

Thanks for any ideas

Thrax

Ghost4linux.

AlphaTrinity

That seems simple enough, and we already have an ftp server setup.

What I'm concerned about is if it supports Windows (I guess I forgot to mention in my first post that we're in an almost 100% Windows environment (unfortunately)). I see it supports NTFS, so my guess would be it does, but I can't find anything online specifically saying that it does.

You are sure that it will have no problems getting through and seeing raid arrays?

Thrax

I'm unsure of its support for RAID arrays, but I also can't envision anything that would prevent it from working. A raw clone is a raw clone. Doesn't matter what the file system or disk configuration is.

stoopid

$600 is a small price to pay for the level of security a good image can give you. However, I think using raid 5 with regular data backups should suffice just about any small to mid-size business. Keeping your data and application servers seperate, if possible, would also help in situations like these.

The trick is to have all drives on a single raid card that's independent of the motherboard (PCI or PCIe of course), and buy a spare of that card (so if the card dies, and they do, it's simply a matter of replacing cards) and a single spare hard drive. If a hard drive fails in raid5 it's just a matter of swapping it out and rebuilding the raid array, which can be done in windows with most raid cards using their windows utilities. It slows things down for a little while while the rebuild finishes, but the downtime is as long as it takes to swap a hard drive.

You can do a simple raid1 on a file server since performance isn't as critical (depends a lot on the hardware though, ymmv). I still recommend a seperate raid card for the same reason mentioned above.

stoopid

Thrax wrote:

A raw clone is a raw clone. Doesn't matter what the file system or disk configuration is.

You're absolutely correct, if the imaging software can see the array and it backs it up you should be fine. No better way of knowing than to test on a dummy server.

GnomeWizardd

I own acrontis, Great program worth every penny

MrBill

We use Acronis for our raid5 servers because Norton Ghost doesn't (didn't) support raid5. We have 9 such servers that are remotely located and Acronis seemed like the best solution. IIRC, I got the recommendation right here at IC.

AlphaTrinity

I agree GW and MrBill, Acronis is amazing, and I agree with the bit about $600 being a small price to pay for how wonderful the program is, but we just don't have the money available right now (600 times about 10 servers).

We already have plenty of spare motherboards and raid cards, the problem is just finding a nice simple imaging software that will do what we want. And I'm not concerned with RAID 5 at this point; only RAID 1 and RAID 10.

I spoke with my manager today about ghost4linux, and he wasn't a big fan of the ftp aspect, but said that we would give it a shot if I couldn't find anything else.

I wonder, does anybody have any experience or know of a good site that deals with making a (Bart) PE disc that only has specific utilities that we would want that we could create? I've never actually tried to find sites to try making a custom PE disc since I've mostly heard that it isn't easy.

Thanks for the help so far!

stoopid

AlphaTrinity wrote:

I wonder, does anybody have any experience or know of a good site that deals with making a (Bart) PE disc that only has specific utilities that we would want that we could create? I've never actually tried to find sites to try making a custom PE disc since I've mostly heard that it isn't easy.

Thanks for the help so far!

I can't believe I remembered the name of the app off the top of my head, considering I've never used it .

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pe+builder