John Grove - Norton Ghost

Norton Ghost 9

Computers will always go wrong. Wouldn't it be great if you could turn the clock back and start before you lost all those important files, or you trashed the whole computer?

There's several ways you can protect yourself. You can back up essential files on a bunch of CDs - but that does little to save the programmes and all the settings.

Norton GoBack or Windows XP Restore will enable you to return to an earlier configuration - but not if the whole hard drive is trashed, or you've been invaded by a virus.

Some computer suppliers provide a parallel hard drive in the same machine that replicates everything stored on your main drive - but whatever corrupts the main drive will corrupt the second.

The only safe option is to regularly back up the entire drive to another - preferably in a computer housed in another building, but more realistically elsewhere in the same office.

Here's my recommendation...

Install an additional hard drive the same size as your original. Using Norton Ghost 9 , you can automatically run a complete (baseline) backup once a week, and an incremental daily backup to save the data that's changed since. Norton Ghost 9 will run invisibly in the background while you continue to work on your computer.

There's two main options for restore with Ghost.

1. Restore specific files/folders

2. Full restore of the whole hard drive.

The full restore will reinstall not just the programs and your data, but all of the register settings for your operating system. In other words, your computer will be returned to exactly the same state as it was when the back up was made.

A full restore of a 85GB hard drive takes around 50 minutes.