Symantec Ghost Licencing

[ranj]

Is it correct that ghost licences, you purchase once and then your covered, or is renewable every year. Thanks

[Geoff]

one for each PC you want to be able to ghost.

[Norphy]

The licence is perpetual but there is a maintenance cost if you want to be able to contact Symantec support.

[Face-Man]

It's a one off cost but you can buy a yearly mainenance that mean you get tech support and upgrades

[DMcCoy]

one for each pc you *ever* use it on, client or not. However, there is an option on the ghost command line to remove the signature on the HDD, it also blanks the drive. This releases the license from that machine.

[CyberNerd]

Time to mention Ghost4Linux..
http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
yes it does windows drives, backs up/restores to/from ftp server or locally, no licensing. works for us.

[Midget]

What about imaging progs that don't have a per machine licence? do they exist?

[PiqueABoo]

Time to mention Ghost4Linux.. <snip> ..works for us

How fast and how compressed (relative to the £££ ones)?

[CyberNerd]

compression: you can select between none,bzip2(good on a fast machine), gzip (like zip), or lzop (??).
speed is determined by: network, disk speed, ftp server.

The main point though is this is a bit for bit transfer - it won't just back up files, it will back up the entire disk including free space, therefore I assume it will be slower than the commercial tools (the zero's on a disk will compress, but it still reads them), the upside of this is that it will image any (disk) filesystem. I don't have any benchmark data, best to 'suck it and see'.
I think of it as dd with some extras.

also see G4U http://fbim.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/g4u/

edit: can cause problems if imaging using different drive sizes !
don't bother trying if you need to go from eg. 80.1gb disk to 80.0gb

[Rammie]

Have you considered using SynchroParc?

http://www.crdp-reims.fr/synchroparc/

Unlike Ghost, this works as a site license and it doesn't need any resident software. Basically, it's a disk-clone tool, but once you've set it up, it will automatically fix the registry issues which normally prevent you cloning a disk (i.e. Windows licensing and network IDs). You can even clone onto a blank disk, provided you boot up from a CD such as BartCE and map into the network directory. It runs more or less as quick as your network will allow. Subsequent cloning passes just copy/delete any changes and run even quicker.

Three caviats - it doesn't like saving the latest version of Sophos; as always with cloning, remember to delete and renew the WSUS ID (it doesn't fix this one automatically); and you need to brush up your technical French

Rammie.

[MK-2]

ranj: are you asking this because your finance dept or yourself have just been contacted saying that your leasing of Ghost has expired and if you don't pay up they will require the software back?

[Midget]

Have you considered using SynchroParc?

http://www.crdp-reims.fr/synchroparc/

you need to brush up your technical French

Rammie.

This looks interesting, and here it is in franglish

seems to be €392 (a assume its euros) for a site licence, which is cheap.

have you tried this? does it work well?

[Espada]

we use Drive Image XML with Bart PE which works quite nicely.

[Uraken]

whats the cost implication on drive image it can't be free surely but the website suggests it is?

[ChrisN-0123]

You can pay a one off cost but I recommend the Maintenance package where you get the major updates. I just upgraded to Ghost Solution suite v2.0.. that is Vista compatible for the future.
Symantec normally release a major ghost update (v1 to v2 etc) every 1-2 years.
Hope that helps! ~Chris