Acronis vs Ghost

Norton Ghost 14 Vs Acronis True Image 11

When it comes to choosing the best backup software there really are only two serious contenders. Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, both have been around for years, both have a large user base, and both will do what most people would need a backup software package to do.

According to Google Trends the popularity of searches for Norton Ghost has been on a steady decline over the last few years. Whereas the popularity of Acronis True image has been on a steady increase. It is reasonable to predict that Acronis may very well eventually take the lead as the most popular backup software.

Below is a basic comparison of some of the features of each software package. You can click on the following links to read full reviews:
Norton Ghost 14
Acronis True Image 11

Features	Norton Ghost 14	Acronis True Image 11
Price ($US)	$69.99	$49.99
Operating System supported	Windows Vista, Windows XP	Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000
Minium hardware requirements	CPU: 300MHz RAM: 256MB	CPU: 300MHz RAM: 256MB
Complete Image backup of hard disk	Yes	Yes
Able to create Image backup while Windows is running	Yes	Yes
Incremental Backup	Yes	Yes
Differential Backup	No	Yes
Individual File/Folder Backup	Yes	Yes
Able to backup files in use	Yes	Yes
Schedule backups	Yes	Yes
Outlook/Outlook Express backup separately	No	Yes
Backup files to FTP	No	Yes
Backup data to external hard disk	Yes	Yes
Backup data to removable media such as DVDs, CDs, etc.	Yes	Yes
Password protect backup	Yes	Yes
Password encrypted	No	Yes
Can restore individual files and folders	Yes	Yes
Backup data is compressed	Yes	Yes
Size of Image backup files can be preset	No	Yes
Include/exclude certain file types with filters.	Yes	Yes
Verify/validate backup	?	Yes
Create mirror/clone backup of hard drive	Yes	Yes
Software can create backup recovery disk	No.	Yes
Span the backup across multiple drives or disks.	Yes	Yes
Image backup file format	.v2i	.tib
Continuous data protection	No	No
Logging/Reporting	Yes	Yes
Backup is bootable with recovery disk	Yes	Yes
Restore individual files and folders	Yes	Yes