I'm an old-school PC guy. I remember when Norton Ghost was useful for cloning an entire hard drive. This came in handy when you needed to get your PC back into a fixed configuration, maybe for system testing or for building an office full of identical PCs. But the current version of Ghost appears to target folk who just want a backup of their hard drive documents.
If you are one of these people you will likely be happy with the simple copy-all-the-files-to-another-place kind of backup solution, for which there is inexpensive, or free, software available. These simpler programs allow you to find your files later, even if they don't allow for some advanced functionality.
Ghost takes a different approach of packing all of the files to be backed up into a single image, which in turn needs Ghost when it's time to read back the files. While this approach allows for smaller backups (via compression), it's a complexity that most backup scenarios don't need, especially when compression formats like .zip are more widely available and would work much the same way.
Ghost has some nice touches, though. In addition to its imaging capabilities, you can mount backup files as if they were additional discs. Ghost also understands writable optical media and other backup type devices, and you can convert your backup files into VMWare discs, which is useful if you use that particular technology. Ghost also integrates with Google desktop search to find archived files.
