I use Norton Ghost at work (school district IT) and at home. I've never had any problems. You can ghost to and from the network, DVD/CD, through USB from another computer...all without any problems. I've never used Acronis so I can't say better or worse....but as I said, no problems with Ghost. Haven't had the need to re-image at home but once. At work...probably re-image 10 to 20 student computers a day.

If interessted....I have the DOS version of ghost installed on my server. I boot with a floopy that contains a batch file to load my NIC drivers and maps my network drives......hit the network to run ghost and re-image.

Good luck.

Thanks guys. It's good to hear you are happy with either product. I'm also hoping to also hear from people running Ghost 9 (lastest version). My understanding of Ghost 9 is that it's largely based on Powerquest Drive Image, which Symantec acquired. Ghost 2003 was Symantec's product before it was replaced by Drive Image.

For a bit more money, why not a fully-fledged backup system? Starts with a single full-disk backup then switches to an incremental backup thereafter. One pass for the backup and another pass to verify everything backed up correctly. Ability to restore your drive to any point in time (when you made the backup). Capability of backing up your system and/or archiving "sub-projects". For example, I backup my system to (1) another HDD, to (2) an offsite set of DVDS, (3) plus I have a single "archive project" where I archive all my video work to DVD. Every video project I've ever done can be restored. No need to maintain one set of DVDs for each vegas project, the software simply keeps appending all new work to a single set of DVDs. So I can restore multiple vegas projects at the same time, or cherry-pick individual files for restore. Also, a single backup tool can backup all the computers on your LAN at the same time, and be smart enough to store only one copy of the same file, even if its on multiple PCs (e.g., your OS files).

I use retrospect myself, although I think they're resting on their laurels. Veritas is probably the top of the line.

I have True Image - switched to it from Drive Image (which was purchased by Symantec and is now merged with Ghost). I like True Image.

Thanks for the heads up on Acronis True Image folks - man it is a lot easier to use than Ghost! Just did my laptop - quick, easy and painless - no reboot, no horrible interface - me likey :)

Just curious...since I have never used Acronis True Image......

Will it allow you to generate several different images (one at a time of course), boot and work from a network drive in DOS?

I have used Ghost for years but am always looking for an easier, better way!!

Thanks.

I never succeded myself in acheiving reliable incremental backup with Retropect. Time consuming and rustrating experience. I have yet to find a reliable utility to just "backup only the newer files on folder x to folder y"

BTW, Ghost works fautlessly for complete system backup...

I use Acronis on about 50 servers. It has many great features, live backups, incremental and sceduling. Easy to restore a whole partition, or just one file. You can mount a image as a drive and browse it. The speed of backups is also great.