As I am re-imaging my Windows-XP notebook after a crash, I am try Microsoft OneCare as an alternative to other virus/spyware protection software. So far, OneCare appears to do its job well for this purpose.

OneCare also has a data backup feature. I have been using Norton Ghost 9.0 for backing up my PCs at home for a couple of years. I haven't felt the need to upgrade to Ghost 14.0 so far.

So, I have to decide between using OneCare and Ghost as my backup tool going forward. Since I am using OneCare for protection, I thought it might be a good idea to also configure it for backups; that way I don't need to install and manage two applications.

I decided to try setting up a backup with OneCare. It is fairly straightforward and seems to work smoothly. I suspect a lot of people will like its ease-of-use. Ghost 9.0 appears a little more daunting at first look, but that's about it.

One thing that I haven't seen in OneCare yet are options to choose level of compression, password-protection of backed-up data, and also the different types/schedules for backups. With Ghost, all these are supported and quite useful.

The different levels of backup are full or incremental. With incremental, you can choose how often you want to run it automatically, and also how often to create a new baseline backup. I may go back to using Ghost for backups for these reasons, while continuing to use OneCare for protection.

However, there is another feature of OneCare that is worth mentioning. It lets you make any PC as a hub to manage protection and backups for other PCs on the network. Now, that is very convenient if you need to manage multiple PCs at home.

I must point out one important caveat: I am comparing the latest OneCare with Ghost 9.0, which is about 3-4 years old -- the latest is Ghost 14.0. So there may be some cool features in the latest version of Ghost that make it even more usable and manageable.