>> In fairness, Ghost does much, much more than dd does. In particular,
>> Ghost comprehends NTFS, so you can do things like restore to a partition
>> of a different size, backup only the "used" sectors, etc.
> 
> Like the many ntfstools? I'm sure there's one that can skip free blocks.

Are there any that aren't alpha? Every system I've seen for reading NTFS 
from Linux is either read-only or has a big flashing red disclaimer on 
it. Ghost was written by people who's signed the NDA and seen the spec 
for the NTFS filesystem.

>> And you can browse and modify the backup image on the server 
>> without having to restore it first.
> 
> Mount it with a loop device.

Random, but... why the hell do you need a loopback "device" in the first 
place? Why can't you just mount (say) an ISO image directly? Requiring a 
loopback device means that

1. there are only a finite number of them available,

2. before you can mount anything loopback, you have to determine which 
device numbers (if any) are free.

It just seems unecessarily complicated...

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