tinjaw: volume shadow copy, innit?

A nifty thing with Acronis is that the (linux-based, but actually well-working  ) "recovery CD" or "safe zone" pre-boot environment can access SMB/CIFS (aka windows shares), so you can back up stuff to a server on the lan - and restore from it, even if the windows install is completely b0rk.

Ghost was nice, but I'm done with it since symantec took over. The king is dead, long live the king etc.

Ghost was nice, but I'm done with it since symantec took over. The king is dead, long live the king etc.

Wasnt ghost always a symantec product? I know they bought out powerquest which had driveimage, but ghost has always been around as a symantec product...

It was always Norton Ghost (as far as I can remember) but when Symantec acquired Powerquest they started to screw around with the app and basically moved the code over to PQ Drive Image.

Unfortunately in the process they lost both markets - rather like Partition Magic !

There are loads of different imaging solutions that work great and I would definitely recommend most of them before Ghost these days. Acronis works fine.

some salient info on Ghost, courtesy of Wikipedia.. btw, did you know that - The name Ghost originated as an acronym for "General Hardware-Oriented Software Transfer".

Go to Acronis web site. You can down load a free 15 day trial of latest version. This is a super program and the real image of your PC allows you to rerstore after a complete failure very easily.