File Recovery Guide

Ghost simply creates an image of your drive and writes it to a variety of media (i.e. CD’s, floppy disks, etc…). With this, all your data, including installed applications, settings, and files can be easily restored. Here you will find how you can create a ghost backup.

Before starting, you should be aware that Ghost works from a DOS shell and is therefore limited to the kind of things DOS can do.

Step 1: The first thing to do is create a Ghost boot floppy. All operations using Ghost are done from a booted floppy disk, using either PC-DOS or MS-DOS. If you’d like, you can include peer-to-peer networking support, or CD-RW support, as well as other drives. Now you can pick your options in the BootWizard application and create the boot floppy.

Step 2: Next you need to secure your backup media. If you choose to use CD-R disks, you have to divide the total used capacity of your hard drive by 650MB and then buy that number of CD’s to hold the disk image. You can also choose to buy a second hard drive large enough to hold the used portion of your drive.

Step 3: Now it’s time to save yourself a headache and start the backup. Boot from the Ghost floppy created in step 1 and allow the program to boot.

Step 4: At the Ghost interface, select “local”, then “disk” from the pop-up window and then “to image”. Here a dialog box will appear asking for the source disk. Choose the volume you want to back up. Another dialog box will appear reading “save filename” that lists all your connected drives. Once you’ve selected your drive, you’ll be given the option to compress the image file.

If you have a large amount of data on the drive, compressing the files can help lower the number of CDs necessary for the backup.

Step 5: You have a choice of three different compression levels: none, fast, and small. If you choose no compression, the Ghost image will take up the same amount of space as the used portions of the target drive. Small compression will save you some space but the time to create the image and recover the volume increases. The fast option saves some space and is comparatively quick to restore the volume.

Step 6: When you have chosen the compression speed, insert your CD-R media into the drive and allow Ghost to copy the data.

The process to restore from your backup CD is simple. First, boot from the Ghost floppy and select “local”, then “image”, then “disk”. Now you will be able to select your CD as the source, your disk as the destination, and restore your disk to the configurations that you backed up with Ghost.

Norton Ghost is a Symantec product.