I’m referencing alternatives to this product:
Management has asked for lower-cost alternatives. The site has about 150 PC desktops.
Google for “disk cloning”. There are many applications, some of them free.
It all depends on what exactly you want to do. Paid apps have features like incremental backup, retrieving and storing a disk image from/to the network, have support for more hardware etc.
I am afraid I Googled the problem prior to posting the question.
I was hoping that I could avoid testing the dozens of solutions out there.
works great. Last ime i used it I cloned 4 computers at one time through the network. I hear computer labs and such use it. its my goto app now that I dont use Ghost anymore.
its pretty much TRK but with a very basic wizard interface. Botth work very well.
I am a huge fan of acronis true image
As far as I can tell, it’s the best solution going, but at $50/head I can’t sell it to the boss.
If you do not need images but just data backup something like Allway Sync to a shared folder on a server can backup as little or as much as you want. $10/each for the pro licences with premium support lifetime upgrades, yada, yada.
Need to image, not back up data.
Doesn’t that include Norton Holy Ghost?
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Cramden Ghost is a little more intense, drives like a bus.
I’ve used DriveImage XML in the past, and found it reliable.
$500 for a 100-user licence
Might I ask why all of the machines at the site need this? What is the actual problem you’re solving here?
New image roll-outs due to the standard corporate software load changing a LOT, routine system reloads, and management deciding Ghost Rent Is Too Damned High!
how recent are the machines, would it be worth having them all boot to VM’s and have a standard VM image? OR perhaps if you have a lot of rank and file drones just running a handful of apps, thin clients may be a better option. Those who need more powerful machines, fine but if you have 100 users on the same basic loadout, TC’s may be for you.
Not looking to migrate to thin client or VMs on the desktop just yet, but good looking out.
And many are loaded with unwanted and spammy programs. That’s why the voice of experience is so valuable.
If you’re just using it to push images out, you don’t need a licence for every machine in the estate, do you? I thought most imaging programs could produce standalone output - so you’d only need licences for the machines producing the images, or have I misunderstood something?
Yeah, Norton is nowhere NEAR that kind about licensing.
This is a message board post, not a cite, but the guy’s experience mirrors mine, and he sums it up:
"You must have a license for every machine you image
Ghost is, and always has been ever since it was first created, licensed on the basis that once a machine has been deployed to with the Ghost executable VIA ANY MEANS then that machine has a Ghost license attached to it, and your organization must have purchased sufficient client licenses to cover every machine which has been deployed using it. It’s that simple. All of the other tools included in the Ghost Solution Suite - including the management platform itself - are simply adjuncts to that to make it easier for you to deploy machines using the core Ghost executable."