Corporate Ghost Backups

It is very important to backup your system regularly, to insure that your important files are protected. If you are unlucky to have a system failure whether it’s a hardware failure or software corruption restoration can be as simple as a few clicks... I am going to demonstrate a method of backup that is used in large organisations such as the education sector and large businesses.

I will be using the Symantec Norton Ghost Solution Suite for this demonstration; this piece of software is the most commonly used in a large environment needing a large amount of backup and restores jobs.

Components that are needed for this demonstration:

1.       Server Running (DHCP, Ghost Solution Suite)

2.       Router / Switch

3.       Client PC (With Windows Installed With A Selected Configuration)

4.       Cat  5 / 6 Cabling

5.       Hiren’s Boot CD (or equivalent ghost boot media)

All components must be set up correctly to function together, the server must have DHCP installed and configured correctly for the server to assign the client an I.P address.   First of all will be to install the DHCP service on the server, in this case DHCP has already been installed and configured.

The second step would be to install the Norton Ghost Solution Suite; the installation procedure is very simple and does most of the configuring itself it does however asks you where to install and to accept the license agreement.

Once Norton Ghost has installed, it will ask you for to input a license, in this case my license file is in my C:\ drive, now that Norton Ghost is installed and licensed we can get on and start an imaging session!

I will now start the Ghostcast server; this is where you can create sessions and accept clients to create images and restore from images on the server. The Ghostcast server has several settings. I will explain some of these options.

·         Restore – Restore from selected image on the server

·         Create Image  - Creates an image of the client hard drive to the server

·         Destination – Destination of the new image or the restore image

·         Session Name – Session name to identify which session you are connection to

Because we do not have an image to restore a machine with, we will need to create an image of a client that has Windows installed. Check create image and then choose a location for the image to save on the server, for this demonstration I will use the data drive on my server. This is recommended if you want to keep your ghost images safe if your main drive was to become corrupt etc, a session name is required to make multiple sessions  easier and more organised ... I will use a session name of “Ghost”

Now once all the settings are double checked we can start to accept clients, once the accepted client’s button is clicked you can see that it is waiting for clients to connect. You can view clients in the table to the left.

Now it’s time to boot up the client with the windows configuration you chose, I will use a boot disk called Hiren’s Boot CD this has a ghost boot image on. However you can use any boot disk that has support for ghost, the ghost DOS boot loader is pretty straight forward.

Upon booting the ghost image you have a few options to choose from, for this to work we need to go to the Ghostcast menu and select unicast, we will be ask for the session name; as mentioned before we will use the session name “Ghost”, last step! We will be asked compression type. Fast is fine for normal backups. Now the backup will begin, this can take 5-30 minutes depending on the network speed, hard drive size and hard drive speed. 

In the instance you are backing up/restoring more than 50 computers at the same time it’s inconvenient to use a lot of boot disks, in large sectors they will use network boot to boot there desired ghost boot image, this is very handy in large backup & restore sessions. Network boot uses TFTP (Trivial File Transport Protocol) and DHCP, the setup of this can be very complicated... because of this I will not be going into the setup of the TFTP server however I will explain how the Norton ghost boot image is created.

Symantec Norton Ghost has a built in image maker, this can create images for a network boot or to burn to a disk and use it like the Hirens Boot CD explained before, the wizard is very simple and asks you destination, boot type (I choose Linux), and other minor options. Once the image has been created I will select the image in the TFTP server, now the image will boot ghost from the network.