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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.

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.

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.