I am in a situation where our portable hard drive has taken a turn for the worst and now our only alternative is to push images to a network share.
Unfortunaly norton ghost does not support networks (as far as i can see) so we are out of luck with what we currently got.
Open source/free software would be great but paid versions will do.
Norton Ghost can save to a network share by one of two ways:
-JFV
Acronis True Image family of backup/image creation software does support network shares. It works pretty well.
I use partimage, a Linux-based solution that takes full-partition or full-disk images and saves them as files. It can run across the network (by using
partimaged
on the server being used as storage) or by simply mounting a network share at some local folder, then saving at that folder.There is a free/open source program called g4u (Ghost for Unix) that works pretty well as a Norton Ghost alternative. Don't let the name turn you away - it's operating system agnostic.
If you have access to a local FTP server (or can temporarily create one with FileZilla Server, etc.) and a DHCP server, it should work smoothly.
If you use Drive Snapshot it can write images to the network while the computer is running. Obviously you can't restore an image while the OS is running. For that I use a WinPE or BartPE boot CD or USB key.
WinPE is based on Vista while the last BartPE I saw was based on 2003/XP and needs some messing around to add drivers for the latest hardware. You can get a copy of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) from www.microsoft.com/downloads while BartPE is available from www.nu2.nu/pebuilder.
John Rennie