Ghost 9.0 vs GoBack 4.0

[IndyHoops]

I've decided to build a new PC and since I'll be starting with a clean slate, it occurs to me that it would be an outstanding time to create an image of my hard drive including the OS, latest drivers, browser, e-mail client and MS office.

Basically, an image with only the "must haves" that I can revert back to should the system get screwed up by some future software installation or installation.

Given that, I was wondering whether you would recommend I use Ghost 9.0 or if GoBack would meet my needs, since I'm looking more for system recovery than data archival.

One option I have considered is to buy a second hard drive and use it as my backup media, rather than burning to DVD, but another HD would basically double the cost over simply buying the software and using discs.

Any advice is appreciated.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

If you buy another harddrive, just make sure they have a program to copy the entire existing drive onto the new drive making it bootable. This way it only costs you the price of the drive as the software is a free download.

I'm not sure, but I believe several of the major harddrive manufacturers offer a program of this sort. I use Western Digitals almost exclusively with their 'Data Lifeguard' program.

[deddard]

The cloning/imaging software provided by the hdd manufacturers are great if you need to copy stuff across to a new hdd when replacing the original.
Ghost is a different kettle of fish, and I consider it one of the best buys I ever made.
I regularly ghost hdds (My hdds are in removable caddies) and have just created a disk which stores just the OS and security programs, together with my basic apps (office etc) and made images to DVD - these can now be used in the way you describe. It took about a day to load everything up from a clean install, installing all the service and security packs for everything, but if the brown smelly stuff hits the fan, I can now restore in about 20 minutes, and the dvd takes up no space at all.
There are other software packages that do the same job, so I can't say which is best.
check this site for reviews of ghost and similar packages.

[357mag]

So far I've tried two backup programs. Norton Ghost 2003 and Drive Image 7. As far as I can tell Ghost wins. Ghost is easier and simpler to use and only takes about 9 or 10 minutes(for me anyway) to make and restore your image. However the last time I used Ghost when I clicked on Restore my C drive was restored just fine, but for some reason my D drive was completely GONE. I'm currently trying to find out why. As far as Drive Image goes making an image is really simple, but restoring the image takes too long and you are presented with some hard to understand error messages and screens. Bull**** if you ask me. Some other programs I'm considering are Paragon Drive Backup and Acronis True Image.

[LadyGrey]

I've been using Ghost 2003 for quite awhile, until now. Recently it just quit working, by that I mean that it will go through the process of ghosting my partition and saving it to another hdd or a disk but then when I go to check the image it says "Not a valid Ghost image". I've been round and round with Symantec support but so far nothing has helped. I went looking for another program that is within my budget and had a free trial and came across a little thing called NovaStor InstantRecovery. So far it's worked fine. It burns a start up disk and is pretty user friendly to me. I messed with it some, even did a restore from the image it made and it seemed to go flawlessly. It purports to be able to image any drive to anything, disk, tape, I think it even said USB, may be wrong on that, but so far I like it and if I decide to buy it's just $35.
LG ;)

[Paul Komski]

A couple of peeps have mentioned speed and of far more relevance than software is the hardware on your system. With my SATA raptors I can both make and restore partitions using DriveImage2000 in a couple of minutes! The image-copying runs at about 1.2GB/min.

Drive Image is superb - except for its price and the fact that it is no longer owned by PowerQuest. BootItNG from terabyte is a good replacement and for a freebie there is Image Maker (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3914.html)

There are many Ghost afficianados but it is a program I have seldom used "in anger" (that is when the chips are down).