Ghost 4 Linux

[Bartie Spalitto]

Althoughdesigned around Norton Ghost (considered the most reliable application of its kind), the strategies presented here (such as performing a test-restore, to ensure your back-up image will work when you really need it) can be applied to any disk cloning program.

On a personal note: I have cloned thousands of drives with Ghost, it never failed me. Ghost is still the reference and 'industry standard'. the only program I consider anywhere near Ghost would be Drive Snapshot.

I really don't know - Yes and No, I am guessing the problem with Acronis is simply an artificial limitation because they sell a server version. There should be no difference if you are performing a block level backup/image. I am guessing that Ghost will be the same - however, Acronis and Ghost both come wit a cut down bootable version for backing up / restoring... I am guessing that using this will bypass the restrictions.

I have always used to think of Ghost to be "the standard" but in recent versions, they go one step forward with an amazing feature and then go two steps back with a restriction or something that just makes you wonder why they do it.

All my answers have been based on using previous versions of Ghost (with the exception of the specification of the first). If they have made it even worse, I would be surprised as these are key features.

I am using Ghost right now, version 16 booted from DVD to clone a Linux Mint drive. It sees it as :// ext3 for the swap partition, and :// unknown for the Main linux partition.It appears however it intends to copy contents of the entire hard drive, to the image, no matter that you have as in my case 250gb drive it is going to backup the entire space of the drive. Where normally it could compress it down to just the used part of the drive.

The most (and boy do I mean most) valuable features in Norton ghost is the ignore bad sectors option. With this option you can actually backup a damaged hard drive, to some degree at least. If the drive is badly damaged it might not be able to read past the defective areas. However in my experience it usually will. And of course like the older versions of ghost it can perform a sector by sector cloning or imaging of a drive.

The program I can count on for doing images of Linux OS is redo. Its totally free. It will also do many other OS images, including windows 8.1 etc.The only headache about it is the speed. Prepare to spend a lot of time doing the backup.Also unlike most backup programs, it makes a lot of small files in the location it backs up to. I also cannot yet figure out how to backup over to my LAN. Like Linux sine it boots up a flavor of it, you need to know how to get around in Linux from a terminal prompt. It has no option to skip bad sectors, and although you can force it past errors you would probably spend a lifetime getting past them on failing or nearly failing drive.

But I am holding personal testimony that it works with Ubuntu 64 bit compatible. I was able to install a bunch of stuff. On rhe completion of the full resotre everythung came back as normal and working.

About the worst part, is in dealing with the complicted menus and options. However there are only a few steps needed to get things running. Eventually there must be someone talented to figure how to do a live version.I.e. be able to fully image inside of the running Linux.Windows based versions of this such as Macrium Reflect which is my staple for Windows based OS, do what Microsoft refers to as VSS (Volume Shadow Service) which takes a snapsoft of the drive from within the working O/S to accurately clone off the drive while your still using it.The downside of that of course is that you simply cannot say install stuff or copy around data into the working drive, and expect it to be in the backup you just created. In other words it would be only as complete as the last VSS Shadow Copy scan, which is just before it starts the backup process.

I have been using GHOST for quite a few years to back up

my Windoze partitions from NTFS to a series of images

on a fat32 partition. I usually boot off a DOS7 bootable CD

and simply ghost over to the fat32 partition.

Hello qawtbh, I have been using Acronis True Image for a few years and back up each XP partition & each Suse partition sector by sector (except the swap) and have never had an issue. I am not sure about Ghost but would think if you could back up in the same manner it would work.

Current version of Ghost should handle EXT3 just fine, from what I

recall. Earlier versions (7 or earlier IIRC) had problems with the EXT3

journal, so to do a file-by-file system you had to convert back to EXT2

using tune2fs.

> Both Ghost and Acronis are nice tools.

>

> For an open source alternative use dd or ddrescue

>

> Note1: pipe it into gzip otherwise the filesize will be too big Note2:

> use a proper blocksize to speed things up

Anybody managed to get the casper development environment running on linux? I encounter horrors with gulp, grunt npm hell, local, global etc, etc

I was not able to find any instruction for this, spend already hours to get it running.

Was not able to run yarn install, yarn dev. Million errors and problems on any linux distribution and every environment. npm, yarn, grunt, gulp

Your link shows only how to start ghost locally, i can do this.

I am not able to get the enviroment to for casper theme development.

The only information i got is yarn install && yarn gulp. That does not work.

With the instructions from your link it gets much worse, since i have to deal with the right versions and right way of installing node.

I did not want to use grunt at all, at some point at a local install it was demanded. I am sorry, but the guide is not detailed at all! I am missing a fool proof to have this thing running on linux. Docker images is usually the easiest way, because then you have all the versions of the used software fixed. In the suggested way there are no informations whatsoever what software exactly to use, on what OS in what environment it was tested. There is no step by step instruction how to get this thing working on linux.

I am sure it works with this instruction on macos out of the box and i am sure that it will also work on a particular linux constellation out of the box. I am missing this information. Sorry, but the install instructions on the site are completely useless for the problems i am encountering due to the complexity of the node eco system,

I also tried rebooting my system but those mountpoints still show up. I cannot find any process that would still be using these mounts. What gives??? Any other ideas about how to clean up these 'ghost' mount points?

Every once in a while an application will "crash" or otherwise stop working, typically this is Brave, but not always. The problem is that when they stop working I'm left with a "ghost" window that lingers and cannot be interacted with. If I do a "Windows Key" + D it minimizes with all other active windows and comes back when I show the desktop again. It does not respond to clicks and cannot be removed. What I'm looking for is some command to reset whatever is causing that "ghost" app to persist.

I waited for it to happen again and tried xkill. Unfortunately the click goes right thru the visualization of the ghost window and targets plasma, thus killing it. Plasma then restarts itself and the ghost window remains. I also checked for any running brave tasks and nothing exists. It acts as if it's just a visual artifact.

I started researching the compositor and KDE Desktop Effects. As it turns out, it appears to be related to the "Translucency" Desktop Effect enabled within KDE. If I go in and disable Translucency within the Desktop Effects applet, the ghost window vanishes. I can then re-enable Translucency and it's gone for good. Very strange.

So I have worked with RPM (Redhat package manager) and it has a feature called ghost files. This type of file designates a file that is owned by the package, but is not necessarily installed through the installation process (useful for files that the program generates after it runs). More about the ghost directive in RPM can be found at the link below

So far the only way I have found to approximate the ghost behaviour in .deb packages is to touch the desired file and specify it as a config file in the debian/conffiles file. That way it is owned by the package but will not be updated every time a new version is installed.

What I am wondering is if there is a more official equivalent to this behaviour in the debian package manager, mainly looking at Ubuntu. I am using debuild to build the packages. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

What I need to accomplish is to allow the package manager to know what files may be created by the program when it runs. These files should not be updated when a new version is installed and should not be deleted when the package is removed. The files should only be removed during a purge of the package.

The alternative that comes to mind is to just clean up these files in a postrm script, which will allow your package to completely and cleanly uninstall, but will not mark the file as owned by your package. You could probably use a preinst script to initially install the file so the package knows it owns it and setup preinst and postrm to only act at the initial install and the final removal (and not at the removal/install steps during an upgrade).

I have a Dell Power Edge 830 running Red Hat Enterprise Version 4 for Intelx86 and em64t and I want to ghost it in order to have fresh hard drives and the old as back ups. I have Norton Ghost 15. Can the Norton Ghost 15 be used for this? Will it work well? What are the procedural differances from using it for Windows? Any recommendations that will help? Thank you, Doug

I'm having a problem trying to use Ghost on one of my labs. This semester one of our instructors wanted to have a lab that can dual boot Win Xp and Linux. I set it up and pulled an image with ghost with no problems, but pushing the image back out causes Ghost to crash with the following error.

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