Ghost Solution Suite

Hi Team,

Our requirement is to have a Ghost software  which can take a full system and hence we purchased Ghost solution Suite 11.5.

We need to know how can I take full server image using Ghost Solution Suite if any other servers are not connected to the main server which needs to backed up.

Also our company has peer to peer connection .Please help us out with the steps.

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Ghost is not really a backup product - you need to look at Backup Exec or whatever the product is now called.  It is not really intended to be a server imaging product as it is intended for desktop machines.

Having said that, you can make an image of a server if you boot the server to WinPE and run Ghost from there. Presumably you would backup the system image to a locally connected USB drive or to another volume on the server.  I would never recommend imaging a running system drive as you don't get a clean "snapshot" of the image due to things changing continuously.

Can you guide me as which software of Symantec should i use for full system backup for an windows server 2008 R2 and retrieve it back whenever required.

My goal is if my server crashes by any means i can recover my server within few hours using the backup files.

Also let me know the procedure to take full system backup and restoring it back

You could still use the Ghost application as a backup tool(with the limitation of no incremental/differential backup).The reason I would recommend GSS (if you could get the imaging process to work smoothly) is its cheap when compared to those fancy backup softwares,which are no better/user friendly when compared to Ghost full backup(image).

Create a boot media using WINPE.If the server runs on RAID you might have to add storage drivers under WINPE for the hard disc to get recognized.Once you have the boot disc ready ,boot the machine and you could have an external USB hard disk to store the image file.This is the easiest method of all the rest.

Here on Connect, under Endpoint Management, go into the Backup and Recovery forum and seek advice in there, as they will be able to give you the full picture on what is available and how you can use it to give you a reliable server recovery solution.

Yes, you can use Ghost with WinPE to make images of the server, but it does mean that the server needs to be taken down and rebooted into WinPE, so your images will stop being up to date as soon as the server goes back into service and files start to change. It is also a time consuming process.

With a solution designed for server backup, you can perform automatic full and incremental backups which are more current and require a lot less of your time.

There are also similar products from companies such as Acronis which again can take backups while the server or workstation is running.  I use Acronis TrueImage on my Windows 7 workstation and it is really an install and forget program.