Norton Ghost 15 versus Acronis Acronis True Image Home 2010

[morland]

Hi,

I am making this posting after spending a good amount of time searching on the net and on this forum. I would like to go with one of these on my Windows 7 PC (64-bit). I know there's plenty of material out there but my questions are probably very basic and maybe not covered in all the stuff that i ran into. Hope to get help.

1. What is the difference between cloning and imaging. I thought these were the same thing
   
2. I have been using Norton Ghost on XP for about 2 years and am inclined towards it.
   
3. Which one produces small images when used with full compression
   
4. Which one is faster
   
5. Which one is faster
   
6. While searching (before making this post) i came across the term SID and the sentence that "The Paragon and Norton Ghost both have a Change SID option". What is SID and what are the benefits of SID
   
7. Norton Ghost 12 allows the user to boot from a CD and restore from a saved image. I assume Norton Ghost 15 also offers this feature? Does Acronis also offer this feature?
   
8. Is it true that Norton Ghost is much easier/simpler to use than Acronis?
   

Will be very thankful for your help/reply/guidance.

P.S

I would like to share 2 links with forum members that I came across and while doing this little research.

http://disk-imaging-software-review.toptenreviews.com
http://www.osnn.net/submitted-news/98951-norton-ghost-v15-0-acronis-true-image-rant-review-new-ghost.html

[DigeratiPrime]

1. Cloning is usually making a copy of an entire disk and is sector based. Imaging is usually copying a filesystem.

2. OK

3. I think imaging can compress better as it is usually aware of the filesystem. For example Microsofts WIM format.

4. Imaging is faster since it will skip empty sectors and usually excludes temporary files.

5. ^

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Identifier

7. Yup, pretty much a standard thing these days.

8. Thats subjective.

BTW I reccomend making a bootable WinPE disc (using WAIK), than capturing/appling WIM images with ImageX from Microsoft. Microsoft also has tools to service offline images.

[DaveWI]

just an FYI, Norton (Symantec) uses StorageCraft's drivers, and base software to accomplish it's task. The fact they license the rights makes me lean towards StorageCraft, as they update their source code much more often, where Symantec uses the original code they licensed.

[morland]

Ok thanks everyone for your useful replies. Let me get hold of a test machine from somewhere and play with the trial version of both (if available). Wish I knew what VMware is. I read somewhere that it is probably ideal for such situations. Will start a new thread for VMware so that I do not end up discussing different things under this thread.

Thanks again.

[sevenalive]

+1 for True Image, wouldn't trust anything else. MS Own backup utlity is fine for backing up data weekly, but for entire images, your better off with True Image.