Good evening, I have an old version of Ghost, Symantec Ghost 6.5, and reading the documentation it reads: [quote]Symantec Ghost images contain only the actual data on a disk. If you have a 9 GB drive with only 600 MB of data, the Symantec Ghost image is about 600 MB or smaller if you use compression.[/quote] I have used dd and dd_rhelp minimally in the past. Do these programs image the actual data only? If not, what programs can I use that are comparable? Thank you.

dd makes a direct *bitwise copy* (which in normal speak means that *everything* in dd's path from will be written; free space, data, if it's in dd's path and it's readable, it's copied). I've found 2 programs which will do want you want, but be warned that NTFS support is still experimental. 1) Partimage: http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page 2) G4L (Ghost for Linux) http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l

Give the dump and restore commands a try. They're normally used for backing up to a tapedrive, but its simple to redirect the output to a file somewhere. Best of all you can do it on a live running filesystem w/o any problems. Just be sure to put the output file in a different partition then the one you're backing up. Fast tutorial: kalmiya rick # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3 9.2G 5.8G 3.0G 66% / /dev/mapper/vg-content 922G 234G 642G 27% /content say I want to back /dev/sda3 up to a file in /content. kalmiya / # cd /content kalmiya content # dump 0fz9 ./backup.img /dev/sda3 That will create a image of that partition in the current directory (/content see the man page for the other flags). Normally when I restore the file I boot the machine into a live cd, mount the root directory, cd into and cat the image to the restore file (cat backup.img | restore -rf -) There are alot of way of backing up and restoring with this command. I've even piped the data over ssh and done a dump that way. ssh root@host "dump 0fz9 - /dev/sda1" > dump.image. This only backs up the filesystem of the partition, so its more like the ghost way of doing it then the dd way.