You have to realize that the one quote that you quoted is not the whole story about Ghost.
One of the men on that site is one of the original Ghost writers and is still an employee of Symantec..... so of course you're going to get the "Party Line".
People trying to exclusively deal with Symantec are of course sometimes banging their head against the wall. There ARE other routes.
What you're saying takes only seconds is NOT a complete hard drive backup. You can't even read an entire C: drive in seconds, let alone compress the data and write it to another location.
That type of backup will do you no good at all when the computer blows up and fries the hard drive.
You must have a complete Image of the entire C: drive on some other media. You still have to have some way to boot the computer and restore that image to a blank hard drive. The bootable DVD serves all those functions. Toshiba uses that method, with Ghost, for their Factory Restore DVD.
The only two programs that I'm aware of that will do a complete HD backup like that are Ghost and Acronis True Image.
I evaluated Acronis TI and found it seriously lacking for my needs, so I continue to use Ghost, a program I'm more than familiar with.
A Whole-HD backup is only as good as the person doing it.
Only backing up your stuff once a month is foolhardy at best.
I provide technical support for two corporations where a Ghost backup is done to a removable HD every afternoon when the days business is done.
A clean HD will back up in less than five minutes to another HD. Yes, writing a full drive backup to DVD takes a little longer.
You're new here, so you don't have any idea how many words about Ghost have been written right here in this forum or how many people are now running Ghost because of what they have read here.
I've personally assisted dozens of users to set up their own Ghost backup system.
When you say "Complicated and Costly" I have no clue what you're talking about.
Anyone who wants Ghost can have it, and anyone who can read English and click a mouse can run it. There's absolutely Nothing Complicated about it.
But since you're really happy doing things your way, you probably shouldn't change.
Ghost.exe is a DOS program that can be run from any Bootable media (I even have it set up to run from a bootable SD Flash Memory Card)
and Ghost 2003 or 8.3 will write it's backup Image File to any media with enough space to hold it. There are even two compression options.
I use FAST compression when saving to a HD and HIGH compression when writing to a DVD.
With HIGH compression, I still get my entire C: drive on just ONE DVD.
Most of the problems you see people having on that web site, are because they have either an old and out of date version of Ghost or old hardware that does not lend itself well to running Ghost.
Or, they are trying to do things that Ghost was never intended to do.
That's when folks come to the site looking for "Work-arounds" and there are many.
Good Luck and Happy Computing,
The Doctor
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