Ghost Solution Suite

hi im currently using Norton Ghost 11.5 from the boot CD FalconFour, and hirens boot cd to do backups from a external hard drive to the computers.

the question is do i need licences to do the instalations localy for 1 computer at the time or is it legal to do so?

It is the case, and always has been back to the creation of the Ghost product in the mid-90's, that to clone a machine using Ghost by whatever means you employ - boot disk, external USB, network, multicast, unicast, with the management console or by hand - that doing so requires a license be used which is then considered "attached" to the machine you clone. One license, one machine.

[ Genuinely large enterprises may have special volume licensing programmes with Symantec which don't require that licenses be pre-purchased, and instead do an annual "true-up", but that's an accounting detail - the licenses are nonetheless absolutely required for legal use of Ghost. ]

The attached licenses are (with the exception of special "one-time" licenses sold to computer manufacturers) perpetual and cover cloning a machine over and over again, but using Ghost without such a license purchased for a machine is not and never has been legal.

Just to be clear, the specific boot CDs you mention contain almost nothing *but* pirated software, and using such collections of pirated software in any way in an enterprise puts your organization at legal risk. Also, in most legitimate enterprises using such a collection of pirated software would be considered misconduct so using these does put you at personal risk.

It's worth pointing out that in cases where employees discover historical piracy in an organization, it can often be resolved without undue fuss. For example, it's not uncommon for people starting work in an IT department to discover that pirated tools like Ghost have been used without licenses on company systems, and in such cases the enterprise sales folks can help resolve this and help the organization "get legal" after the fact.