Hello, I just had a discussion with another technican in my company with how ghost works. I was told ghost would only copy the exatlly same file structures when it loads the image onto a new hard disk. But what I found was all files been restored on to the new disk DO NOT need any defragment at all .Even the image was made from a deframent-required hard drive. So the question is , How Ghost works, does it carry any file resort jobs at the same time as the image being created or when the image being writting to the new disk? I had searched the document provide by Symantec, no such details. Could anyone help me out and provide me some official issues about how it works please? Coz no one trust me at this stage around my company. Cheers a lot , gurus!

As far as your co-workers trusting you, I don't think anyone here can help with that...but, Ghost does not duplicate a disk exactly. It copies the contents of the files and recreates the partition information. If you want to copy the sectors, boot track and unparitioned space, then you need to use switches when you create the image. Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

I don't see what this thread has to do with Security & Virus. In any case I believe the likely explanation (Post 11 of 12) given in this thread is what you are looking for. To wit: Norton Ghost uses the byte-by-byte method as opposed to the file-by-file methods used by most other backup software. When doing an incremental backup, Ghost compares the hard drive and current byte-by-byte, in order. By defragmenting your hard drive, you changed the order/position of a large number of the bytes that make up your files. Remember, Ghost doesn't look at the file as a whole, which has remained unchanged, or the directory it's in...it looks at the bytes, which have been changed, in a sense. Thus, it backed the data up again. Hope this helps i_Xp/VistaUser

XPUser, I wondered the same thing... Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

Thanks a lot Xpuser!!!

You're most welcome. i_Xp/VistaUser