I know Ghost 9 well- Is Acronis necessary

[ronandownes]

Hi My question is that I know how to use ghost well and have  licenced copy. Have I all I need for incremental BUs on my DAM data or should I face th learning curve of Acrois echo workstation for the sake of versatility?
Ronan

[danaltick]

Ronan,

Ghost should serve you fine; however, I wouldn't recommend using it to backup your images, but rather to ghost your operating system hard drive or partition.  If you're using buckets as outlined in The DAM Book, then manually copying your buckets and/or job folders to secondary storage is the preferred method.

Dan

[ronandownes]

I have an awful lot of active material as I am putting shape to thre years of chaotic workflow. For this reason manual BU seems a very labour intensive process. Say fror example I have a 750 gig drive for 2006 raw files I am deleting duplicates and importing images from DVD bu  that fell of the live collection at some stage. Lets say at the end of a day 100 gigs worth of change has occurd between new imports and deletesd. Isn't an incremental BU only going to involve 100gig load where as a ful bu wil involve 750 gig and all the wear and tear load on the harddrives?

Also when you say manual are tools still being used. I bought Vice Versa but hate the programme. nay time I do anything with it it start of deleting like crazy and freaks me out.

Ronan

[danaltick]

Ronan,

The problem with an incremental BU is it will scan your entire archive looking for changes when all you need to do is copy the additional job folders/buckets to secondary storage to back them up.  For expediency you may want to image your original archive using ghost, but from then on, I would start using buckets and just copying them to BU as the buckets fill.

Dan

[Chris Bishop]

The 100 GB alterations are only made once to each file. Once a bucket is full and backed up leave it alone. Create new buckets to remove duplicates, back up the new bucket (in several different ways: remote HDD, DVD etc) then the old files can be deleted, or the old DVD's just stored away from the workspace.
It may be prudent to run the Image Verifier program available from the Image Ingester Pro site (search this site) to check that the files have not be corrupted in their journey around your computer.
Chris Bishop

[ronandownes]

Tank you both so much. It makes it clearer.

Chris as it happens I bought the intire ingester suite the other day so I sould verifbefore deletig duplicates. That way I will avoid the silly scenaio that I delete god file and keep their corrupt  counterparts. I have now made bette fil select redunantas a find - will find ll duplcats.By leaving these in  " TO DELETE FOLDER" I can do my verifying on the main collection and only retrieve any duplicates if the main image was corrupt.

I have a lot of raw files. I would guestimate 2 Terrabyte and I would also say there is on average 1:1 reduntancy within.

Now there or 2 laptops 2 High performance PCs and 2 P4 PCs downloading DVDs . I switched from folder match to Viceversa for downloading but there must be a better application for downloading a 100s of DVDs onto Harddrives. Ideally I should pop in the next DVD and come back later to see an open tray and a confirmation that all files copied successfully. Is such a sw available or the next best thing?

Ronan

[ronandownes]

Guys this post doesn't really have the right heading anymore and you will see I started a thread on the overhaul. I am going to cut and paste my last post over to the overhaul tread. and fix the typos!

Ronan