What’s the difference between ghosting programs and data backup programs?

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  TacticalHelp.com
  February 20th, 2010

  Ghosting saves everything like programms installed, settings, everything.
  Data backup is just music, photos, files.

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  Frank
  February 20th, 2010

  Ghosting saves an image of a Drive or Partition.

  Backup will save selected items: Files, Folders, Program settings, Registry….. It all depends on what you select.

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• 

  TechInsider
  February 20th, 2010

  The idea behind Ghost was for it to act as an ‘imaging’ program. Imaging software takes an exact ‘picture’ of the hard drive, which is suitable for (usually) perfect transfer to a different hard drive or different computer. Like say I worked for a company, and I had to prepare 50 new systems with the company’s required software. Rather than prepare 50 individual/indentical systems, I need only prepare one system, ‘ghost’ that hard drive, then ‘ghost’ it back to each system. There’s more to it in this case, but the ghosting/imaging technique and purpose fits well

  Data Backup software usually has more precise choices for what and where to backup. Like, I could choose to only backup the my documents folder, and only every-other day, and only to the computer named ‘BigCheesy’. Futhermore, I could tell it to do a complete backup or only backup changes in the My Documents folder. I could also schedule the software to take a complete ‘ghost’ of the hard drive once or twice a week, copy all the old archives to another location…you get the idea.

  Norton Ghost and Genie Backup Manager are both lower level programs and do roughly the same thing. Between those two, I like newer version Ghost the best (because it comes with the last version of Ghost, which is REALLY the best).

  Outside of those two, both PowerQuest and Acronis make excellent and well-loved backup utilities.

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