I want to make a full image and regular daily incremental backups.
Will both programs do this
Yes, as long as the OS is XP or 2K with Ghost.
and which would you recommend?
There isnt a clear best.
The big advantage with Ghost is that its by far the most widely
used so there are a lot more who can comment on odd quirks etc.
Main downside with Ghost is that you cant boot a CD and do
a backup of the system without installing Ghost. Thats not that
important for the main machine where installing is no big deal,
but it is handy if you want to work on a system that isnt backed
up and want to do a safety image before doing anything to it.
And Ghost 9 will only do XP and 2K too, not the older Win9xs.
Ghost 9 is still a little buggy, you can just always
just browse the lan drives for images, particularly
if the default workgroup WORKGROUP isnt used.
Just a nuisance tho, you can name the PCs explicitly
with fully qualified PC names instead of browsing.
True Image is a bit cruder and simpler and some stuff
isnt that well documented in the manual, even quite
basic stuff like mapping drives for network ops etc.
And while you can boot True Image off CD and dont need to
install it for safety image creation, you cant do that over the
network, because there is no way to map a network drive.
Thats a damned nuisance in practice if you do want to do
a safety image of a system before doing anything to it.
I normally plug those systems into the lan because its
most convenient to have them use the broadband on the
lan for even quite basic stuff like installing various stuff etc
and a drive on the lan is a handy place to put a safety image.
You basically need to use a USB or firewire drive for the safety
images done in that situation. Does support all the OSs tho.
I have been using Dantz Retrospect with an external usb drive but
Retrospect has been throwing a lot of errors lately and their tech was
nice, but not helpful when all he could say about its stopping before
completion was that Retrospect was "choking on some file or other".
Thats pathetic and good reason to bin it.