Ghost V 14 Applicability

A friend told me to look at Ghost for my back up needs.   My limited experience in this area leads me to two questions regarding Ghost V 14 capabilities:

 

1.  Can I make a mirror copy of my hard drive so that if my onboard drive fails, I can make a swap with the back up drive and boot up the computer with no loss of data or programs (other than changes since most recent backup)?

 

2. Do I have to dis-able or uninstall my anti-virus program (AVG 8.0) to make the mirror copy?

 

Thanks for your assistance.