NICE ARTICLE, MANY USEFUL AND VERY HELPFULL INFORMATIONS, THANKS SO MUTCH FOR EVERYTHING WHAT YOU WRITE IN THIS ITEM! 
VERY HELPFUL 
CHEERS

Universal Restore to be included in the package.
DriveClone Pro includes Universal Restore in its $50 value instead of having to buy this feature like a side order. Universal REstore is crucial nowadays, allowing users to restore to dissimilar hardsware of different size, format, brand, or even different operating systems!

And one unique feature of DriveClone I like to point out is its USB Hot Drive. It allows you to backup and restore onto an USB drive. Interesting enough, you can view from the USB and work from it as if it were your local hard drive. like a mini clone.

here's a free trial I found:
http://www.farstone.us/download/driveclone-pro/DriveClone-Pro-5.0.exe

And I heard there's a promotion going on right now... anyone know the promotion code?

Norton Ghost is too fancy and annoyingly too much. It just takes too much time trying to feature out all its features and you don't even end up using half of them.

I'm really into products that are affordable and have friendly user interface, keeping all the necessary features, only the ones that are important. DriveClone Pro was perfect for me!
It's around $50, cheaper than its competiting software.
It's real nice and easy to follow.
It has all the features such as: incremental backup, automatic backup, complete drive backup, bare metal restore, complete external backup, hardware support, vista/windows support, customized schedule backup, pre-windows recovery.

more info:
http://farstone.com/software/driveclone-pro.htm

I switched from Acronis 10 to Ghost 14 a while back. Sure, there's more to fiddle with in Acronis, but I've never had so many problems from an imaging program. It took them months to get round to adding support for the ICH8R to their recovery CD, then I switched mice only to find my G5 didn't work in the recovery environment. Final straw was when I couldn't produce a single validated image in Vista post sp1 (even after a reformat and hours in memtest).

This is the only Norton product I'd touch with a bargepole, and it's definitely more competent than their usual efforts! I like being able to add drivers to the recovery cd - that's really made life easier!.

Using Ghost 11 and the lack of support for Windows 2000 is enough to make sure I don't upgrade to 14. It seems that they love to come out with new versions with minor new features but still all the bugs. I'll just stick with 11, I know how to get around the bugs.

It is devestatingly annoying for a freethinker such as myself to see companies skip version 13 as if it's something bad. First MS with Office 14 and now this POS.

Can we all leave our kindergarden fairly tales now?

I have XP PRO at home and I always wanted some sort of backup or an image. I remember when Ghost was a DOS product and it was begining as a Windows product. It worked really well. Everything was imaged to a CD and that was it. I remember seeing it work with W2K with no problems. If you needed to restore an image, out came your floppy and CD, and the PC was reimaged. I tried to create an image with V12 on my XP PC and even with the Symantech support line, it could not be done. I refunded the product. I do not use any Symantech products anymore. They're either bloated, too expensive or they don't work.

There are other alternatives for cloning these days that are pretty good. HDClone has been good for me.

Ghost has gone from being the no-brainer choice for cloning to a becoming a questionable choice. Not a particularly good track record by the Norton development team.

How can you describe a difference in backup times of little better than 2% - 785 sec vs. 767 sec = 18 sec as a 'noticable improvement? I doubt many people would actually notice this improvement.

Anyway, the last time I had to rely upon recovery from a Ghost image it just plain & simple didn't work.

Personally, I think that any backup solution that requires proprietary tools for recovery is of very dubious value - even the slightest bug in the software can make it worthless, as I found out.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/
http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page
http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Ghost is dead, the spectral image you see before you is actually Norton Drive Image. Which still sucks.

i think ng sucks acronis is fast and has more features

...does it still have the ability to create a boot floppy or CD? That's the one and only feature that is important to me...and the reason why I never upgraded from Ghost 2003. The version after that didn't have that capability...which is mind-boggling to me.

so... is there any reason i should change from my trusty ghost v8.3 ??

ghost v9 was awful... so were v10, 11, 12 and 13

does this steaming pile of **** come with a lightweight dos executable that can be written on a dos-bootable cd/dvd alongside the ghost backup images to create a single-disk recovery dvd?

I didn't know they made 3.06 Mhz P3's. That must have been an early prototype in your Dell. ;) s/Mhz/Ghz s/PIII/P4