Ghost is, from all I've heard, a very good program. As has been mentioned, it's original purpose was for system administrators to distribute standard hard drive setups to multiple machines.

It is being packaged with OEM software fairly often, and of course it can be handy.

It should be noted though, that virtually all of the hard drive manufacturers provide setup utilities that come with any new drive, or that can be downloaded at no cost from their web sites. If you start with a new or clean drive, one of these utilities can "image" an existing drive so that it's swappable/interchangeable with the existing one.

Once the image, including the operating system, is in place, you can backup everything else just by copying to the drive, since location on the disk doesn't really matter for your data files.

Recent Windows versions also have built-in backup utilities, that allow you to easily do incremental backups of files that have changed since the last backup. Microsoft's reputation on recoverability from backups has a few scabs on it, but if you don't compress your backups, they should copy back okay. I'd be inclined to at least make a separate backup folder for anything you didn't "image" to the disk at first setup, perhaps.

John