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The venerable name Ghost hearkens back to the 90s, when it and Powerquest's Drive Image were the main competitors in disk imaging. In a confusing turn of events, Symantec bought Powerquest and the former Drive Image became Ghost. Whatever its heritage, Ghost 14 is an extremely competent imaging program--with one possible deal-killer.

Ghost shares the same friendly interface design with the company's average-user-oriented Save & Restore 2.0, and my only gripe is a matter of style. There's an offer to download Google Desktop embedded within the Options tab of the main program, not in the install program where it belongs. Ostensibly this is because you can use Google Desktop to index your backups, but searching backups is fine without it. Personally, I'd rather it didn't take up space in the menu.

Ghost uses the same backup and "recovery point" concepts as Save & Restore. Most programs employ the word "restore" instead, but recovery means the same thing. The use of the term "recovery point" shields the user from the rather difficult concepts of differential and incremental backups at the expense of confusing pros who are looking for those options.

Performance-wise, which is what really matters, Ghost is as fast and reliable as ever, though it uses lots of memory. In addition to easily backing up and restoring both partitions and individual folders, there are numerous pro IT-type features such as e-mail notification, backup via FTP, network throttling, file filters, and logs. It can also create a restore partition on your hard drive like the ones many top-tier PC and laptop vendors provide, which eliminates the need for a recovery disc. For most end users and IT departments, Ghost is perfectly suitable. However, there's one major deficiency that's kept me from using Ghost personally since it was still Drive Image: The recovery CD is only that. You can't create an image with it as you can with virtually all its competitors.

Why's the ability to create an image using the recovery CD important? Imagine your Windows installation has crashed and you want to safeguard any recent data before recovering it. What if you need to grab the data off of a failed machine that hasn't been backed up? With Ghost's recovery CD you can copy files off, but not image the whole kit and kaboodle, a standard safeguard procedure which has saved me considerable trouble over the years. Hence, I've gravitated towards programs whose recovery CDs will create images, such as Acronis True Image, R-Drive Image, and Paragon Drive Backup. The free DriveImageXML will do this as well, but you have to add it to a Bart's PE recovery disc--not a particularly easy process.

On the other hand, Ghost can create a custom Windows PE 2.0 restore disc that includes the current drivers on your system to make recovery almost foolproof--if you have at least 512MB of memory. Less memory than that, and Ghost's recovery disc is basically a coaster. If you do have the required memory, you'll also find network utilities, Symantec's virus scanner, some primitive partition editing, and other handy tools, though the CD is slow to boot.

I could live with the Google-wants-to-rule-the-world integration if Symantec would see the light and add image creation back to its recovery disc: They haven't, so my concession is moot. However, if the emergency imaging scenario isn't one you're worried about, Ghost is first class in nearly every other regard.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Jon L. Jacobi