Recent review in a Japanese computer magazine picked both Acronis & V2i
desktop edition as their two top picks from the lot of common backup
programs.

Ghost produced images that were smaller than the other programs, but
took longer to make the backup - naturally since compressing more adds time.

V2i here:
http://sea.symantec.com/content/product.cfm?productid=3

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IME, Ghost always does a perfect job in making working backups in the
years I've used it.  Yes, annoying because you have to drop to DOS to
start the backup or restore, but that ensures you are making a 100%
backup w/o worrying about open files (that are constantly changing)
during backups (never do trust backup programs that run while the OS is
also running myself though - even Acronis admits this:

"I have complex applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or
Microsoft Exchange running on my server. I plan to create an image, but
I'm not sure if these applications can be running during the imaging
process. What should I do?

Although Acronis True Image 7.0 takes care of hard disk and
filesystem-level consistency via snapshot technology, it does not
guarantee application-level consistency. We recommend you to suspend
complex servers such as Microsoft SQL, Oracle or Microsoft Exchange
before pressing the Proceed button on the last page of the Acronis True
Image 7.0 application wizard. Once the imaging process starts, you can
resume server operations. It is not necessary to suspend the
applications for the duration of the imaging process.").

Drive Image has been another long-time favorite used by many in the past
(http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/) that works well.

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Of these various programs, Ghost does do backups to external USB/FW DVD
& CD writers, which most others can't.

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http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,1738,4798,00.asp

Keep in mind that you also can't do a perfect bit-by-bit,
sector-by-sector full backup of a HD w/o dropping to DOS to make a 100%
perfect image of the entire HD.  You'll need this if you're doing file
recovery, have programs that write program protection bits to parts of
the HD outside of the normal filesystem, etc.

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