How To Differentiate Among Disk Software -- We put four products to the test

Backup, restore and deployment products resolve many pains for VAR clients. But drive and disk-imaging and cloning products present the best opportunities to save time in installing and deploying multiple systems. In this hands-on review, we examine four products from Symantec, Altiris and LANDesk and uncover their strengths and weaknesses.

Any of the following packages can be recommended depending on the situation. LANDesk can handle the management load incumbent with many nodes, and with minimal headaches. Altiris, one of the fastest- growing names in the business, should be considered alongside LANDesk, especially where large networks are paired with short staffs. For smaller networks, you should gravitate toward the easier- to-deploy solution from PowerQuest. If you place a lot of faith in the native Symantec product, compare it with PowerQuest's before making your decision. Symantec bought it for a reason.

Here's a closer look at each offering.

Symantec Ghost

Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition Version 8 has finally offered up a disk-management interface under Windows after many years of life as a DOS command-line tool. The latest software also provides a broader array of network-management utilities and has added a new Ghost Console. Everything installs quickly and operates intuitively, presenting a familiar Windows look and feel.

Ghost.exe and Ghost32.exe enable the basic backup-and-restore functions of drive cloning and are compatible with Windows 9x through XP. Images can be created and restored over common media (USB, FireWire, TCP/IP, Mapped Network Drive and LPT port connections). One of the nicer improvements to Ghost is that you don't have to wipe a drive clean in order to add a new backup partition. Ghost lets you set up virtual partitions on clients that already have operating systems installed.

Best described as a multiple, remote quick-restore application, the GhostCasting Server lets administrators restore multiple computers expediently while bypassing the Ghost Console. The GhostCasting application can deliver a single drive image to...