[geeks] MS SBS Server - issues and questions

[der Mouse]

> I strongly suggest you look at Ghost.

> g4u is very, very slow and is a disk hog.  Got a 40GB partition with
> 1GB of data?  Be prepared to watch 40GB-worth of bits fly over your
> network!  Yes, that's right, g4u gets *everything*, including the
> unused sectors.

You mean Ghost doesn't?  That strikes me as a near-critical failing,
because it means it can't work right unless the filesystem on the
partition is (a) one it recognizes and (b) undamaged.

In particular, this means you mustn't use ghost to save a copy of a
damaged partition before you try to repair it.

> Did I mention that it's slow?  Last time I tried to use it took
> almost 6 hours to transfer a 40GB volume.  Ghost would have done the
> same in under 3.

g4u just uses dd and ftp in a pipe, as I recall.  dd is inefficient
when it comes to wall-clock time, as it makes no attempt whatever to
overlap reads and writes.  I've written a program that *does* overlap
reads and writes, and under a few circumstances I've seen almost the
ideal speedup of a factor of 2 versus dd; usually the speedup is more
like a factor of 1.5 or so.
(ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/hacks/blt.c for them as wants.)

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