http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1144041767/0#0

If Ghost 2003 still works for you, then remember, it's the only one of the versions you mentioned that will run from a single 1.44meg Floppy disk.
Versions 8.x and 11.x are too big to fit on a single floppy, with the DOS operating system.

I still use Ghost 2003 from a floppy disk, because that's the only way I know of to make a Ghost Backup DVD and make it bootable, all in one operation.

Cheers Mate!
The Shadow 

klerch wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 7:00am:

That's complex. Under ideal conditions when Ghost 2003 could use its own built-in IDE drivers, it often could run nearly as fast as the disks could handle, unless taking an image when the source disk was very heavily fragmented (because Ghost writes files to image contiguously, it would effectively combine the image with a defragment, making it sometimes slower than the naive PowerQuest imaging tools).

However, a lot of modern SATA hardware forces genuine Ghost in DOS to run through the BIOS at a much lower rate because it cannot employ any asynchronous I/O without its own drivers and on such platforms running it under Windows PE can increase the speed (especially for network clones) quite a bit. Whether or not this makes any difference depends on your situation. It might not speed up at all, or it could do quite a bit, or it might even (thanks to the boot time of Windows PE) get slower. It's not something that's really possible to say definitively.

And in addition, the DOS-based CD/DVD burning code has not really sped up much to my knowledge. Doing so would involve writing a lot of very complex, hard-to-test code to probe drive and media capabilities that is honestly of no real importance to the corporate customer base we sell to now.

Given that the ex-PowerQuest tools can also take images which are small differential files containing only changed sectors, it's for most users better overall as a consumer backup product than genuine Ghost ever really was (whereas Ghost is and always has been better for deployment and manufacturing). For things like hard drive transplants it's really a matter of preference.

klerch wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 12:08pm:

Given the resources we have for development, and the far more important things our corporate customers are asking of us, it doesn't make sense.

Now, we would like to improve the CD/DVD writing in Windows one day - and in particular support higher-capacity media like BD-R, which would work faster as well - but the kind of code changes we'd need to make for that to happen wouldn't be ones that we could possibly port to DOS. That environment is simply too restricted - as it is, the existing Ghost CD/DVD code has to do all kinds of ugly things to deal with e.g. buffer underruns that are non-issues on any sane OS platform, and indeed the complexities of managing buffer underrun in a non-multicasting OS are so severe that I doubt that Ghost would really be able to go much faster than it does at present.

I suspect you're right about the 1x writing speed.
But if you want to get the basic backup over and done with in the least amount of time, set the spanned file size to about 4 gigs and make the backup to a separate partition on your HD or to a second (even external) hard drive, then later at your convenience use a burning program like NERO to burn the spanned images to DVD's at whatever speed your burner and disks can handle.  That will give you a safe way to put your backup in a fireproof vault as a hedge against disaster.

Yes, as our HD's get bigger and bigger, the old Ghost backup takes longer and longer.  That's why I go to extremes to keep my C: drive as small as possible so I can still get it compressed onto a single DVD.

I've used all three versions of Ghost mentioned above and I've gone back to the 2003 version because it seems to run just as fast as any and will run from a DOS Boot Floppy......the other two are too big to fit on a floppy disk. (but, they run just fine from a boot CD or Flash Drive)

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow 

Are there any incompatibilities between these Ghost versions? For example, if I make an image in 2003, can I restore it with 11, or vice versey?

At least I can be sure that upgrading to 11.x (for example) will still allow me to use all my previous images. Thanx.