It will make a faithful compressed image of a hard drive. This is especially nice for backing up critical data. You can, for example, make a true backup of your operating system partition, so that you can reinstall it hassle-free if your "C" drive goes out. I use it at work to update software in high-end copy machines. The new ones have UNIX based operating systems on laptop drives that are inside each machine. Whenever updates are released, I download a Ghost image of the drive, and extract it onto a laptop drive. Then, I make a swap at the customer's location. I had to flash these files onto embedded chips only a short time ago. It was tricky and time consuming to do. One slip, and a multi-thousand dollar mainboard was toast. The new way isn't nerve-racking, and it saves me lots of time.
Now, let's apply this to you in your everyday life. Let's say you have a 40gig drive full of mp3s, but the drive dies without warning. If you have a Ghost image stashed someplace, you don't lose the music. Otherwise, you would need around sixty CD's and a lot of time on your hands.
Ghost is the only piece of Symantec software that I use. It is a "must have." Doing is far easier than saying. Get Ghost and play around with it for awhile. It's easy, really.
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