Ghost (and similar utilities) are a wonderful thing for people who are responsible for hundreds or thousands of computers. To be honest, I haven't used any version of Ghost since Ghost Corporate Ed 7.5, which is still perfectly good today. For instance, when a big company receives a new computer, they need to configure it. If they're on a Microsoft Volume License plan, they need to wipe the drive (if it came with anything on it in the first place), install the OS, install all the patches, apps, utilities, etc. If you've ever set up a Windows XP system, you know that it can take all day just to get one system just right. At that point, you run "sysprep," a microsoft utility that wipes out the workstation specific information, making the system "generic" and ready to install on the network. Then you create the ghost image. For big companies, that image is placed on a server. Then when the company takes delivery on the other 99 computers of that order, they simply plug those computers into the network, turn them on, and begin dumping the image down to the computers. The corporate edition of ghost has a utility known as "GhostCast," which is a multicast utility, which allows you to send 1 image to as many computers as you have network ports and bench space all at the same time. For instance, the last place I worked had enough bench space to ghost 15 computers at a time. It actually took longer to unbox and plug in all the computers than it did to "ghost" the drives.
It's also terrific for making an emergency backup of a system. There have been situations where a drive was about to fail that we were able to same most of the data to an image, and then use a utility known as "ghost explorer" to pull the critical files out of the image.
Mark
Exactly right, Ghost works best for enterprise deployments of the same software setup to multiple identical pieces of hardware. The Acronis image product (and others such as UltraBac and Symantec Live State) allow a single end user to make an image backup of their workstation while the system is still online through the normal Windows GUI, a significant advantage. With optional modules those products will also support restores to dissimilar hardware, so long as the disk drivers are available at the time of restore.