[jmFightSpam]

Coming from Windows land, the two most popular OS image solutions to me were Norton Ghost and, if you are WIndows VIsta, its built in imaging software.

I just wanted to verify that SuperDuper is the Mac equivalent of Ghost. Is that true? It backs up the entire OS X image and can be restored as such if my internal hard drive failed, right?

Are there other solutions?

Thanks.

[Big Mac]

It's one backup option. Disk Utility's Restore function provides built-in imaging tools, and Time Machine is the new built-in backup feature. SuperDuper is third party software.

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by jmFightSpam 

I just wanted to verify that SuperDuper is the Mac equivalent of Ghost. Is that true? It backs up the entire OS X image and can be restored as such if my internal hard drive failed, right?

I don't know about Peter Norton's Ghost but if it does that job flawlessly then yes, SuperDuper! would be something like Ghost.

[CharlesS]

Disk Utility lets you image a hard drive to a disk image file, which might be what you want. Just open up DU, click on your hard drive in the left-hand pane, and click "New Image". You should end up with a .dmg file which is a complete copy of the contents of your hard drive.

[steve626]

Originally Posted by jmFightSpam 

Coming from Windows land, the two most popular OS image solutions to me were Norton Ghost and, if you are WIndows VIsta, its built in imaging software.

I just wanted to verify that SuperDuper is the Mac equivalent of Ghost. Is that true? It backs up the entire OS X image and can be restored as such if my internal hard drive failed, right?

Are there other solutions?

Thanks.

Actually, SuperDuper is not the Mac equivalent of Norton Ghost. Probably the closest thing to Norton Ghost would be, for a Mac, Retrospect. Norton Ghost is really an entire rather complex and sophisticated system for managing backups with options for restoring at different points in time that the user can specify. Norton Ghost backups are in a proprietary file format which requires Ghost to restore from.

SuperDuper on the other hand does primarily one thing -- make an accurate clone of your Mac's hard drive. It is such a good clone that you can boot from it and when you do, everything looks identical to what you copied from. The clone can be inspected manually as everything on it is accessible from the standard finder (i.e., no proprietary formats). SuperDuper can do incremental updates to the clone but it provides you with a clone, valid at only one point in time.

Retrospect has many of the features of Norton Ghost in terms of managing systems of backups and having many user configurable options. [Retrospect also has a "duplicate" function which produces a disk clone as well, similar to SuperDuper.] With Retrospect (unless you use the simple "duplicate" function), your backups (as with Norton Ghost) are in a proprietary and typically compressed format, with multiple recovery points in time that the user can specify and configure.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Ghost can also restore the image to multiple computers at once over UDP, while SuperDuper cannot.

SuperDuper is more for making the image and restoring it afterwards, while Ghost is a whole top to bottom setup.