Let me say first I used Norton Ghost for 2 years.

I do what it says in my sig. Acronis Migrate Easy & a spare HDD has been my easiest solution yet. My experience with Norton/Symantec Ghost was good until my spare HDD wouldn't boot. Norton Ghost was arbitraryly destroying my system files needed to boot. The Acronis Migrate Easy interface is easier & more step by step (more detailed) than Norton Ghost. With HDD's so cheap this is my current solution. I can easily choose to keep or destroy data from the source drive. Also I can easily accept current partitions on destination HDD or change them. Ability to review different & many choices (very easily explained too, in a window below the selection process) in AME make it hands down my choice over NG.

Does anybody who has experience with both Acronis MigrateEasy & Norton/Symantec Ghost disagree?

I use Ghost on (quite literally) a daily basis. At the shop I work at, whenever we wipe a customers system, we Ghost their drive to a backup drive not only so we can save their files for them, but also so that in case we miss something we have a copy around (but only for three days, then the drives are reused). So far, I've only once had a ghost corrupt data when both drives were ok. I had it not copy some or all of the data when either of the drives had bad sectors, but that's to be expected. I also use Ghost at home for the same reason as you: Every Saturday night (which is usually when I'm not home), I have Ghost set to clone my 120GB internal with my 120GB Firewire. Then, when I get home, I verify the important data manually. After doing all of that, I put the drive in one of those fire-proof safes (I have two years worth of invoices on that drive, as well as backups of them on CD in that safe, and off-site). In my mind, you can never have too many backups, and they can never be kept safe enough.

But enough rambling. To answer your question, I've been using Ghost for several years now and, as said above, have only had one case of corrupt copying with it. Until it fails me outright, I'm going to stick with it.

That's most people's experience I would think. And it was mine for the most part of 2 years. Then Ghost never worked for me right again. It might have been a hardware problem on my system. But I've moved on hardware wise. New puter, built it myself. High quality parts, all.

But I was forced to look for another software solution with the old computer. That solution was & still is Acronis MigrateEasy. And I believe I'm better off for it. I like the easier interface & more choices of AME. Thanks for your input Overlord_Yogi.

I just finished ghosting and made a bootable floppy disk. I have had to use Norton Ghost twice and once I screwed up my boot.INI after an unfortunate uninstall of LH, anyway I agree that Acronis has a more user friendly interface, but I also like the nice demo "how to" movie that NG has. Sure beats having to make a system backup recovery disk through the XP OS.