Symantec LiveState is the new "best practice" to secure your servers and workstations

I'm sure you've heard of Symantec's Ghost, almost a legendary product for taking "images" of hard disks, and cloning these images to another PCs.

Ghost was originally a DOS-based product, with which you had to create a bootable floppy disk, and then boot your PC using that disk. Lately, Ghost got a Windows GUI, but I personally didn't prefer using it since those floppy boot disks worked okay. Until, umm, this month.

Although I'm no expert in Ghost, I've found the program to be easy to use for both workstations and servers. Installing Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory (AD) and Exchange server takes about 10 hours, but with Ghost, you can get a basic operating system image running in 45 minutes. But the problem with Ghost's floppy boot system is that it is increasingly difficult to find DOS drivers (Ghost uses PC-DOS) for modern hard disks and network cards (NICs). Also, Ghost's USB drivers don't like all new external USB hard drives or DVD burners, which is a real pain, especially when you are in a hurry.

Luckily, Symantec has a new product called LiveState Recovery (LSR), which is a great product to replace Ghost. It boots from a CD, and immediately supports your network cards, DVD and USB drives and SATA hard disks. Also, the Window client with which you take your images works like a dream. A Windows server can be backed up in less than 10 minutes, and it only takes about 20 minutes to restore an image to a working hard drive.

That's something I call a working solution to hard disks crashes. Okay, the product is more expensive than Ghost, but for the minimized hassle I'm happy to pay more. Thumbs up for this product!