Ghost and Drive Image Face Off

Making mistakes is a good way to learn--but you're better off still if you can simply recover from them. I've crashed my system completely with software installations more times than I care to remember, and I've learned to hate the ensuing lengthy reinstallation and reconfiguration process. So I was very interested to hear about Symantec's new Norton 2000 Ghost Personal Edition, a disk-cloning program that works by taking images of entire disks or disk partitions. These images can then be transferred to another computer or used to restore the source system. With this kind of program, you can clone your healthy setup before the crash--ensuring a quick recovery if things go wrong.

New Zealand developers Ghost Software pioneered this disk-cloning technology, and Symantec bought the company last year. But until now Ghost has been aimed at larger organizations that use the program mainly for large-scale rollouts of systems over networks. And it's been difficult at best for end users to work with. The new Personal Edition of Ghost is still aimed at power users and allows cloning of disks and partitions locally (disk-to-disk) and between two systems, either over a network or through parallel ports. A quick word here: Mistakes made using drive-cloning software can be very serious, so these programs aren't for casual users. Make one mistake about what you're restoring and you can toast your entire setup. And cloning dissimilar systems often doesn't work well.

Unlike the corporate version, this edition doesn't let you broadcast images over the network, and some other features aimed at simplifying large rollouts are missing. Instead you get a graphical user interface for the program and the ability to restore individual files from disk images.

These are great features, but Norton Ghost isn't the only disk-cloning game in town. To give a clear view of Ghost Personal Edition's performance and value, I compared it with one of the top products available: PowerQuest's Drive Image 2.01, priced the same as Ghost at $69.95. I found both to be very strong disk cloners, but each has features and characteristics that make them appealing to different types of users.

Small but Powerful

Ghost is a DOS application that runs easily from a boot floppy thanks to the small size of the executable and associated files (791KB with the included GDISK partition utility). The slender file sizes make Ghost frugal with system resources: A 386SX computer with 4MB of RAM will suffice for most applications, although you'll need 8MB of memory if you want to do NTFS (network) cloning. The program runs in a Windows 9x DOS box, but it's safer to run it from pure DOS. Ghost won't run under Windows NT.

Unfortunately, Ghost doesn't come with any DOS drivers, so if you have a network card and SCSI devices to support, you'll need to add DOS real-mode drivers yourself. The installation program doesn't automatically create a DOS boot disk for you either, although the process for doing so is covered in the software's documentation.

Drive Image will also run on a 386SX CPU, but it wants more RAM--16MB is the minimum for FAT32 and NTFS cloning, and PowerQuest recommends a 486 system with 48MB of RAM for FAT32 partitions larger than 6GB. Like Ghost, Drive Image is a DOS application, but it won't run under Windows 9x.

The Drive Image installation creates two disks: a boot disk with hardware drivers and a program disk with Drive Image itself. Drive Image is a fair bit larger than Ghost; including the mouse driver, you need 1.1MB of floppy disk space to accommodate it. Drive Image adds some excellent utilities, such as Drive Mapper and Magic Mover, which help you shift applications from one drive or partition to another.

Both Ghost and Drive Image also come with Windows utilities--Ghost Explorer and Drive Image Editor--that let you restore individual files and manage disk images. Both are easy to use, but there are a couple of key differences. Unlike Ghost Explorer, Drive Image Editor can only restore individual files from noncompressed and low-compressed disk images. But on the flip side, Drive Image Editor offers more image file management options than Ghost Explorer.