I just purchased the newest version of Ghost (Ghost 2003). This version supports Linux Ext3 partition. I keep a regular backup of all the critical files on this server but never ghosted it. This is really bad, because the current setup for the server is quite complicated. I’m running a lot of different services on this machine including DNS-Bind9, Courier-IMAP, Webmail-Squirellmail, Qmail-MTA, Qmail-database authentication module, and MySql-database. Configuring all these services would be very time-consuming, and cause me great emotional pain. If this server ever crashed I would be in deep shit. No data would be lost, because I keep regular backups of everything using a perl script but the few customers that I am still providing e-mail/web services for would not be happy being down for a couple of hours.
I used to image my old Mandrake box using Deploycenter at least once a months, but I stopped doing that ever since I “upgraded” the machine to Red Hat 9 three months ago. I just crossed my fingers and hoped my server would never crash. I was lucky this time, and my server never crashed. I now have a successful image of this server on a DVD.
I could now bring this server back to life within 30 minutes, instead of 5 hours. This version of ghost works great. I was never a much of a fan of Ghost but now I am. I resisted buying a copy of Ghost and instead experimented with various open source tools. But all the open sources tools were difficult to use, slow, and limited in features. So I gave up with the open source options and purchased a copy of ghost.
This new version of ghost is great. You can browse Linux partition using the Ghost Explorer (a feature that was missing in Deploycenter), and the list of available NICs has been greatly expanded. Another great thing about this version of ghost is how fast it creates the images. It took only 30 minutes to create an image file of my entire server. It would take upwards of an hour to create image files using Deploycenter.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine — originally posted on woojae.com (“Where Nerds Meet”).