Ghost Backup

[Ramya Bradbury]

Iwould like to set something up using cron and have it dumped to an S3 bucket, but would like to know what should actually be backed up to avoid data loss should I need to restore or migrate everything to a new EC2 instance.

When I do show table on ghost_prod I see 31 tables - are they all needed? I assume only a small selection would be needed and I could create a regular scheduled dump of them, zip it up and have it stored in a secure S3 bucket to avoid having to manually do an export through the admin interface?

Moreover, I always run ghost backup before making any changes, and for good measure use automysqlbackup, which is certainly available on Ubuntu. This provides automatic daily, weekly and monthly backups of your databases.

The underlying tools it uses, partimage and ntfsclone, understand the underlying filesystem. So unlike a simple low-level copy (dd) which copies all bytes, they only copy the used space on the filesystem and its metadata. This results in a much smaller disk image.

If you want to move your data to a new harddrive, the Simple Backup Suite can make it very easy for you. Just backup your data, then install Ubuntu onto the new hard-drive and restore from your backup.

If what you really want is a perfect transfer of data from your old harddrive to your new one, you can use the "dd" command-line tool to easily transfer the data. There's a great discussion of this technique on Server Fault.

GHOST is marketed as an OS (Operating System) deployment solution. Its capture and deployment environment requires booting to a Windows PE environment. This can be accomplished by creating an ISO (to burn to a DVD) or a USB bootable disk, installed to a client as an automation folder or delivered by a PXE server. This provides an environment to perform offline system recovery or image creation. GHOST can mount a backup volume to recover individual files.

Initially, GHOST supported only the FAT file system, but could only copy (not resize) other file systems by performing a sector-by-sector transfer. GHOST added support for NTFS later in 1996, and also provided a program, Ghostwalker, to change the Security ID (SID) that made Windows NT systems distinguishable from each other. Ghostwalker is capable of modifying the name of the Windows NT computer from its own interface. GHOST added support for the EXT2 file system in 1999 and for EXT3 subsequently. Support for EXT4 was added in September 2017 (Enterprise only).

Binary Research developed GHOST in Auckland, New Zealand. After the Symantec acquisition, a few functions (such as translation into other languages) were moved elsewhere, but the main development remained in Auckland until October 2009 at which time much was moved to India.[citation needed]

GHOST 1.0 and 1.1 were released in 1996, followed by 2.0 (2.07) in the same year. These versions supported only the cloning of entire disks. They could run on an IBM XT and without extended memory. They also worked with OS/2.[7]

Version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individual partitions. GHOST could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file. GHOST allows for writing a clone or image to a second disk in the same machine, another machine linked by a parallel or network cable, a network drive, or to a tape drive. 3.1 uses 286 with XMS and could still run on OS/2.[7]

Version 4.0 of GHOST added multicast technology, following the lead of a competitor, ImageCast. Multicasting supports sending a single backup image simultaneously to other machines without putting greater stress on the network than by sending an image to a single machine. This version also introduced GHOST Explorer, a Windows program which supports browsing the contents of a disk image file and extracting individual files from it. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to support adding and deleting files in a FAT-formatted image, and later with EXT2, EXT3 and NTFS file systems. Until 2007, GHOST Explorer could not edit NTFS images. GHOST Explorer could work with images from older versions but only slowly; version 4 images contain indexes to find files rapidly.

Version 4.0 also moved from real-mode DOS to 286 protected mode via Pharlap Extender.[7] The additional memory available allows GHOST to provide several levels of compression for images, and to provide the file browser. In 1998, GHOST 4.1 supports password-protected images. This version dropped OS/2 support.[7]

Version 5.0 moved to 386 protected mode. Unlike the text-based user interface of earlier versions, 5.0 uses a graphical user interface (GUI). The Binary Research logo, two stars revolving around each other, plays on the main screen when the program is idle.[7] In 1998, Gdisk, a script-based partition manager, was integrated in Ghost. Gdisk serves a role similar to Fdisk, but has greater capabilities.

GHOST 6.0, released in 2000, includes a management console for managing large numbers of machines. The console communicates with client software on managed computers and allows a system administrator to refresh the disk of a machine remotely. As a DOS-based program, GHOST requires machines running Windows to reboot to DOS to run it. GHOST 6.0 requires a separate DOS partition when used with the console.[8]

Released December 14, 2001, GHOST 7.5 creates a virtual partition, a DOS partition which actually exists as a file within a normal Windows file system. This significantly eased systems management because the user no longer had to set up their own partition tables. GHOST 7.5 can write images to CD-R discs. Later versions can write DVDs.

The off-line version of Ghost, which runs from bootable media in place of the installed operating system, originally faced a number of driver support difficulties due to limitations of the increasingly obsolete 16-bit DOS environment. Driver selection and configuration within DOS was non-trivial from the beginning, and the limited space available on floppy disks made disk cloning of several different disk controllers a difficult task, where different SCSI, USB, and CD-ROM drives were involved. Mouse support was possible but often left out due to the limited space for drivers on a floppy disk. Some devices such as USB often did not work using newer features such as USB 2.0, instead only operating at 1.0 speeds and taking hours to do what should have taken only a few minutes. As widespread support for DOS went into decline, it became increasingly difficult to get hardware drivers for DOS for the newer hardware.

Disk imaging competitors to GHOST have dealt with the decline of DOS by moving to other recovery environments such as FreeBSD, Linux or Windows PE, where they can draw on current driver development to be able to image newer models of disk controllers. Nevertheless, the DOS version of GHOST on compatible hardware configurations works much faster than most of the *nix based image and backup tools[citation needed].

GHOST 8 and later are Windows programs; as such, they can run on Windows PE, BartPE or Hiren's BootCD and use the same plug and play hardware drivers as a standard desktop computer, making hardware support for GHOST much simpler.

Norton GHOST 2003, a consumer edition of Ghost, was released on September 6, 2002. Available as an independent product, Norton GHOST 2003 was also included as a component of Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional. A simpler, non-corporate version of Ghost, Norton GHOST 2003 does not include the console but has a Windows front-end to script GHOST operations and create a bootable GHOST diskette. The machine still needs to reboot to the virtual partition, but the user does not need to interact with DOS. Symantec deprecated LiveUpdate support for Norton GHOST 2003 in early 2006.

At the end of 2003, Symantec acquired its largest competitor in the disk-cloning field,[citation needed] PowerQuest. On August 2, 2004, Norton GHOST 9.0 was released as a new consumer version of Ghost, which is based on PowerQuest's Drive Image version 7, and provides Live imaging of a Windows system. GHOST 9 continues to leverage the PowerQuest (v2i) file format, meaning it is not backward compatible with previous versions of Ghost. However, a version of GHOST 8.0 is included on the GHOST 9 recovery disk to support existing GHOST customers.

The limitations of GHOST 9 compared to GHOST 2003 were not well-communicated by Symantec, and resulted in many dissatisfied customers who purchased GHOST 9 expecting the previous version's features (like making images from the bootable GHOST environment, no installation required, and no product activation).

Released circa 2005. Supports creating images on CDs, DVDs, Iomega Zip and Jaz disks as well as IEEE 1394 (FireWire) and USB mass storage devices. Supports encrypting images and Maxtor external hard disk drives with Maxtor OneTouch buttons. GHOST 10.0 is compatible with previous versions, but not with future versions.

Norton Save And Restore 1.0, released in February 2006, was the renamed consumer version of Ghost. It used GHOST 10.0's engine, with the addition of features to allow backup and restoration of individual files.

This version provides a "LightsOut Restore" feature, which restores a system from an on-disk software recovery environment similar to Windows RE, thereby allowing recovery without a bootable CD. Upon system startup, a menu asks whether start the operating system or the LightsOut recovery environment. LightsOut restore would augment the ISO image, which comes with Ghost. The latter contains a recovery environment that can recover a system without a working operating system.

NSR 2.0 has fewer features in comparison to Norton GHOST 12. NSR 2.0 offers one-time backups, file and folder backup, simplified schedule editor, Maxtor OneTouch integration and modifiable Symantec recovery disc. This version supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista.

Version 14.0 (November 2007) uses Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) to make backups and can store backups to an FTP site. GHOST can connect to ThreatCon, a Symantec service that monitors malware activity around the world, and performs incremental backups when a specific threat level is reached. Other features include the ability to back up to network-attached storage devices and support for NTFS partitions up to 16TB. GHOST can manage other installations of version 12.0 or later across a network.

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