Others say...

"Ghost 10.0 Back Up"
This product is a must if you want to automatically back up your documents as well as save important files. It also saves your computer configuration and you can return back to a point before you experienced a major problem.

"Stay Away - Horrifically Destructive"
The name fits well: Ghost. This thing utterly and completely trashed my system. I'm a software developer with more years in the business then I'll admit too. Had I known how the folks over at Symantic engineered this thing I wouldn't have even looked at the box. Bottom line it will remove everything from your system if something goes wrong while it is running. How? Well the fine folks at Symantic decided it would be a good idea to create a virtual partition on your system during run and then revert back to your original partition once the backup job is complete. There's a catastrophic flaw in this "logic" which is: what if something goes wrong while the backup is running? Let me tell you from first hand experience, your system is completely and irreversible destroyed. And that's not all you get, this little gem has the added feature of trashing the target drive. Yes, let us say you are going to ghost your C:\ drive to a file on your big D:\ drive which contains all those things you've been saving all these years - oops power went off, someone trips a breaker guess what? C: & D: completely gone. To their credit Symantic has posted perhaps 100's of technical articles on how to recover from this - I personally spent 18 hours trying everything - nothing worked, nothing. I tried support located in India, oh my god what a waste of time that was. So if you are looking to Ghost your system this is the product for you!

"Ghost past it's prime"
The ending first for those that don't want to read the details: GET Acronis' "True Image" INSTEAD!

I used to be a HUGE Ghost supporter, and have owned several versions of it (when Symantec was calling the versions via year like "Ghost 2001" and "Ghost 2003", etc.) At the time, it was the easiest/most clever way to back up your boot partition so you could retore it at a time in the future when Windows completely melted. More than just a file backup app, Ghost actually deals with the structure of a disk and can even restore a boot partition to a larger drive.

However, it's fundamental design is also it's greatest weakness. Ghost runs in DOS; While recent versions can make a "virtual partition" on your HD and boot the computer with it automatically (instead of having to make boot floppies like before), being DOS based still presents plenty of problems. It (used to be) good because it runs "offline", outside of Windows-- important for disaster recovery when your Windows won't boot in the first place.

However, this means any of the relevant hardware in your machine needs to be accessible in DOS... and in this day and age, that might mean a RAID array and a network card so you can save your Ghost images directly on a network server or another computer that has sufficient storage to hold the images. Getting network cards in particular to work in DOS can be a total nightmare if it's not a standard chipset using a generic driver preset that comes with Ghost. Even after you find and download NIC drivers for your card from the manufacturer's website, you can waste HOURS of time trying to get the interface to run properly, rebooting over and over tweaking config files. In my most recent case, even after I finally got it working, it was so slow it took 2 hours to move a relatively small amount of data over the network. Some companies provide DOS drivers that technically *work* but are not optimized for performance by any stretch of the imagination.

If you're backing up locally disk-to-disk (separate drives in the same computer for instance) Ghost works well enough. But if you need to back up/restore to/from a network, be prepared to potentially spend a lot of time at your keyboard.

[...].

I would personally recommend Acronis' "True Image" instead. It's easier to use, it's faster, it can completely back up a boot disk FROM WITHIN WINDOWS and to network shares, all without fuss. For disaster recovery you just boot off the CD and restore your disk images, all with a GUI. So far it has worked to migrade my nVidia RAID to a 3Ware SATA RAID, and on network cards on at least 4 completely different machines, all without having to mess around with DOS drivers and config files. The afore-mentioned partition that Ghost struggled for 2 hours to backup across the network took 19 minutes in True Image. You can even download a fully functioning trial, so fire up Google and go see for yourself (and save almost $30 for a superior product than Ghost!)


"The Best Desktop Backup Software Available"
For years I used PowerQuest's Drive Image 7 for backups. It's rock solid and totally dependable. When Symantec aquired PowerQuest they rolled the underlying technology of Drive Image 7 into Norton Ghost. The result is a very capable and reliable package that can backup partitions or entire drives and also provides support for incremental backups. Most importantly, like Drive Image 7, it provides for emergency recovery of your system. Just boot from the Ghost CD and restore the backup (restore point) that you select. I've tested this process by making both full system backups and subsequent incremental backups, and then restoring the system from those backups. The process works flawlessly. If you need to restore to a different physical drive (replaced a failed drive, etc), the process requires a few extra selections, but is still very straightforward. Just take the time to read the manual.

I've seen Acronis True Image recommended by some both here and elsewhere. I've tried Acronis and find it lacking in one major respect: It simply is not reliable. During trials, I made backups with Acronis. Acronis indicated that the backups were successful but, when attempting to make a system recovery just minutes later, Acronis indicated that the backups were corrupted and could not be used. The backups were worthless.

When purchasing backup software remember that bells and whistles don't count for anything. The only thing that counts is reliability. It must be able to reliably restore your system. Norton Ghost passes that test with flying colors.


"Disk image-Partition Magic worked much better than this!"
I preferred the software when it was Disk image-partition magic as that software would allow you to resize the partition and this does not. For example my 80 gig drive was replaced with a 300 gig. I used automatic restore and when it was finished I still had a 80 gig drive with the rest as free space. Attempted manual restore and still no way to resize athough there is a option for it...perhaps it's just buggy but the older versions (before symantec bought it and broke it) worked just fine.