Is PageFile.sys really empty in the backup?

[Migration User]

When doing a partition backup, PageFile.sys is listed in the image if you view the image with GostExplorer, and you can see it's size. I know for older versions, Symantec said the file was actually empty, but it's listed in the image with it's size so it will be restored correctly if the image is restored.

I want to know if this is still the case with version 3.0.

Thanks.

[Edward Tippelt]

As far as I recall, Ghost has always backed up pagefile.sys as it is part of the "structure" of the disk. It was imagex.exe (which creates WIM files) that excludes pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys from the WIM file as it's more focused on windows imaging rather than Ghost's ability to image hard disks on a sector basis.

[ianatkin]

The Ghost Implementation Guide states that the following files aren't actually backed up in a ghost image,

386Spart.par
Amizvsus.pmf
Dos data.sf
Ghost.dta
Hiberfil.sys
Hibrn8.dat
Hybern8
Navsysl.dat
Navsysr.dat
Pagefile.sys
Pm_hiber.bin
Save2dsk.bin
Saveto.dsk
Spart.par
Swapper.dat
Toshiber.dat
Virtpart.dat
Win386.swp

 

However, as it's tricky to figure out what is and isn't supported in each Ghost engine release, we frankly wanted to confirm this so did some tests. We created images with and without pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys (simply be deleting the files just before imaging) and found that there was no space saving gained from deleting these files in advance of imaging.

This means indeed that these files are simply placeholders in the ghost image file, rather than 'true' files.