Symantec does not make the claim that Ghost 10 is compatible with Windows Vista.

See this thread for a description of Ghost 12, which is designed for Windows Vista and due to be released in late April, 2007.

Cheng, I have not used Acronis TI, so I can't offer an opinion based upon experience.

Where did you read that Acronis "is apparently the no. 1 backup image software"?  It might be true, but I am doubtful.

cheng wrote on Feb 18^th, 2007 at 12:51pm:

Norton Ghost 9.0 is indeed No. 3, but what happened to Norton Ghost 10.0 and Norton Save & Restore in the meanwhile?

they must've not looked at wilders:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65

still, interesting to see feature sets they are comparing.

was interesting to see listed as one of the features. i mean, yeah, nice to have, but that has nothing to do with "imaging" .. as in "disk imaging software".

compatibility i think is ti's biggest hit. if you have the right hardware, you're golden. if not, yer hatin' life.

cheng,

I'm very familiar with Acronis TI. It has always worked for me but the TI forum is scary. If TI isn't compatible with your hardware then your restores may not work. Look for posts on images that verified initially and later didn't verify at restore time. Some people suggest that you should restore an image to confirm that it's good. That's a ridiculous way to run backups. Images must restore. Everytime.

cheng wrote on Feb 18^th, 2007 at 8:57am:

As an interim measure while waiting for Ghost 12, consider this:  Since you already have Norton Ghost 10,
you now have onhand the essential components required to fabricate the elegant solution of either a BartPE
or Reatogo-X-PE CD featuring the "cold-imaging" Norton Ghost Ver 8.2 in a Windows XP Preinstalled
Environment (see below).  Since this bootable CD operates independently of any installed HDDs, I strongly suspect that a "disk-to-image" Ghost Backup would be viable regardless of the nature of the OS on the MASTER HDD.

However, should you wish to take the "quick-and-dirty" path, boot up with the installation CD for Norton Ghost 10 to immediately engage the legacy Backup/Restore "cold-imaging" procedures by following the path

'Recover > Recover Data on My Computer > Recover using a legacy Ghost image'

.  Doing so will yield the side benefit of bypassing both USB mass-storage device and - most, if not all - SATA HDD glitches frequently encountered with DOS-dependent Norton Ghost 2003.  In essence, this procedure uses (an alternate name for ) to allow both immediate creation of Ghost Backup images or the converse Recovery of such images that are in fact totally compatible and interchangeable with those *.gho/*.ghs files created with the of Norton Ghost 2003 -

but not with those files created with Norton Ghost 9, Norton Ghost 10.0, or Norton Save & Restore during "hot-imaging".

El_Pescador, concerning Reply #11, there is a critical unknown:  do we actually have evidence that Ghost 8.2 works properly to backup and restore a PC with Windows Vista?