Ghost is one of the original disk imaging tools, designed to take an exact copy of a disk partition to copy elsewhere. The main elements of the program are again Wizard-driven and you can save drive images to CD or DVD drives and to external and network drives. You can create a drive image from within Windows, but also using a Ghost boot disk, without having to install any operating system on your PC.

While its use for backup is undeniable, there are various restrictions to the program which hold it back. There's no way within it to schedule a backup, for example, and facilities to use a ghosted image when upgrading a hard drive are a bit tortuous. There's very little help on upgrading in the on-line manual and the overall feeling is that you need to be confident you can work on your own.

Ghost has a slightly different remit to some other imaging programs, as it's often used by network supervisors and PC manufacturers to copy standard drive content to multiple PCs. Before Windows XP, Ghost used to be the basis for several suppliers' system restore options.

One particular feature which helps with network management is the program's peer-to-peer cloning. By connecting two PCs with similar specifications, either through their parallel printer or USB ports, Ghost can copy a drive image directly from one machine's hard drive to the equivalent drive on the other. This is a much quicker process than building up, say, a Windows installation from scratch.

While Ghost is excellent at what it does, it lacks rather too many of the features of its main rivals. With Symantec's recent acquisition of Drive Image 7, a generally more sophisticated imaging tool, it'll be interesting to see whether both products continue to be marketed in parallel. It seems likely that they'll be merged into one.