Ghost image

[TLBAT] Ghosting computers without Symantec’s Ghost

At the moment whenever you talk to the IT you may hear “You have to ghost your computer” meaning that you have to create a snapshot image of your computer partitions and store it somewhere. But why people says that you have to ghost it? Because Norton (actually Symantec) Ghost is the leader in this technology but it has a small problem: it costs bucks and you have to spend some money in order to have a business like repository of computer images.

There are many reasons you may need to image computers: it may be for a huge rollout, for backup purposes or for any other reasons that leads you to have a centralized storage for images of the computers in your network.

Seen the spirit of this TLBAT (The Low Budget Admin Tools) section, I alwas prefer to apply opensource/freeware solutions, in this case I suggest you using the PING project (Partimage Is Not Ghost) that says it all: partition imaging is not strictly Ghost! This great tool can be either a bootable cd or a RIS (Remote Installation Services) tool that enables computers in your network to boot from cd/network and save or load an image of their computer to a centralized point.

Once again a great tool, for free and completelly integrable with your Windows environment, I hope someone is enjoying this TLBAT section, if please let me know your impressions through the comments on this blog area.