What Ghost won't do
I've been seeing a fair number of postings complaining -- with good reason -- about problems encountered with ATI2010 and suggesting that Ghost is the way to go. Well, my ATI2010 Home trial just expired and it appears that the current version still isn't working right with x64 Win7, so I figured I'd give Ghost a chance.
Ghost seems to have several limitations that ATI doesn't. These may or may not be important to you.
I like to back up both to a local USB drive and to a NAS. When I try to create a second system backup, it tells me "The recovery point set option is disabled because you have already assigned a selected drive to an existing recovery point set backup job. You can only have one recovery point defined for each drive." In other words, you can use incremental backups only once for each drive. Bizarre. And incredibly time-consuming over the network.
Control of how much space to use for backups is controlled per backup device, not per backup job. So I can't tell it to use, say, 500GB for drive images and 500GB for document versions. You can specify how many versions of a file to save (default is 6) and how much of the drive to use. But this will apply to all jobs using this backup device.
Continuous backup. Acronis is implementing a wonderful rip-off of Apple's Time Machine concept. It's great; I wish it had more configuration options, but it seems to do the job (I have tested restoring files I deliberately overwrote from it). The best Symantec will do is let you schedule your file backup for every 15 minutes... and (a trivial annoyance) you'll also have to tell it that's 96 times a day, 7 days a week. The Acronis non-stop backup does the entire drive every 5 minutes.
Note also that ATI uses a tiered purge policy for the continuous backup (all versions from past 24h, 1 version from each of the past 7 days, etc) where Ghost only keeps the most recent versions. (Retrospect can do something like this, too, but I'm not sure they're still developing for Windows.) The number of settings available to define backup jobs with ATI can be overwhelming, but you can ignore what you don't need.
Configuration of backup jobs in Ghost 15 is quite rudimentary. I've tried to create additional backup tasks beyond what the easy setup wizard in Ghost provided three times now. They do not show up in the list of tasks. Maybe they will once the current task completes, but this is at least a serious glitch.
While this may be just me, I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention that on installing Ghost, the driver for the built-in SD reader on which I have ReadyBoost configured was disabled. Windows popped open a screen saying the driver was missing and offered to have me download a new version, which I did. On reboot, the SDHC card reported 6GB in use -- should have been 4GB out of 8; I have 4GB RAM so the system is configured with 4GB ReadyBoost. Ran chkdsk and deleted a 2GB lost fragment. Also, I was unable to enter disk management until I stopped the SymSnapService. On a third reboot, these problems seem to have gone away. Maybe just coincidence, but not encouraging.
Based on the above limitations, I strongly feel that moving to Ghost 15 from ATI 2010 will be a step backwards. However, it does seem to be more stable; the sorts of issues people have been having with build 6029 and later (see forum.acronis.com/forum/5475) scares me. I have had no issues with 5055 and expect that I will be giving Acronis their $30 upgrade before too long. But I'm not entirely happy about it.
