Man, I've been reading up on Ghost, True Image, Second Copy,,, cannot make up my mind. :doh:

True Image sounded great and I almost ordered it, until I read this review. :dead:

Norton Ghost 14, it has almost as many terrible user ratings as excellent. :o Quite a few people there recommend an earlier version, Ghost 2003.

I am also reading up on NTI Shadow 3.7.1, Genie Backup Manager Pro 8.0, and Second Copy 7 (readers give this one high marks).

There does not seem to be a clear choice. I guess I will go with Ghost.

Ya i haven't gotten ghost since 2003 (good edition). Never heard of the other ones but that doesn't mean they arent worth a look.

Paragon drive backup is also pretty good, other then it only will back up full drives and partitions (it can at least update those backups though).

This one also sounds like it might be good, shadowprotect desktop 3.1 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2254465,00.asp

Btw got me one of those my book drives yesterday, 1tb also.. nice drive though its taken almost 16 hours to transfer over 400gb from my other drive, and a new laptop which will replace my desktop.

Yes I have to admit that the 2003 edition is great, just shove a floppy in to create an image and the same to restore an image!!:up:
Must find out how to put a bootable system on a CD one day, would be even better than a floppy!!:yep: I have (Genuine copy) of Norton Ghost 12 but never used it, easy enough to create an image but not sure on restoring.:hmmm:

The only problem with the 2003 version is it can be a pain getting USB external drives (and other modern stuff) to work since it's a dos boot up. That is why some people prefer shadowprotect which uses a pre boot version vista as its boot environment (which supports everything vista does), other programs use Linux which can be a pain as well.

Doing it over a network is generally easier though that too can be very finicky at times. If you have 2 computers its often just easier to hook up the USB drive to the second computer and network it rather then trying to get it to work in dos or Linux.

The easiest of all is of course a second internal hard drive.

Oh and Reece this link should offer some insight http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

OK, guys, thanks for all the help. I went to Best Buy and bought Norton Ghost 14. Installed and used it to make full backups of my main hard drives onto my 1TB drive. I feel so safe now! :salute:

I have a question.

Does ghost have the abilty to burn to DVDs? My guess is likely no due to copyright issues but I want to ask anyway.

I just picked up a WD 1TB drive myself.:D Makes a difference compared to the old drive that was just 40 GB!

Most of them have that ability, though from what I've read ghost 14 can have trouble with spanning multiple dvds.

There are no copyright issues. You are legally allowed to make as many backups as you like of a piece of software as long as you are only running the software on as many computers as you have licenses for.

This is also why there are still websites on US/Canadian soil that offer ways to get around various forms of copy protection (other then written forms like a serial or key). They exist in a legal grey area (right to make backups vs terms of use of software). So far none of the legal groups for the gaming/software industry has dared try to force the issue to shut down those kind of sites.

I think so. I haven't tried it yet.