Ghosting Away

Version reviewed: 12.0

Norton Ghost saves the stuff you most care about.
Norton Ghost provides advanced backup and recovery for your computer. Protect your documents, financial records, presentations, photos, music, videos, historical documents, or any other kinds of data you keep on your computer by making a backup of your computer's entire hard disk. Or, limit your backup to include only those files and folders that mean the most to you

Some features:

Enhanced ease-of-use
Windows Vista support
Improved Easy Setup
File and folder backup
One Time backups
Desktop search engine support
Convert a recovery point to virtual disk format
LightsOut Restore
Simplified schedule editor
Manage backup data
Automatic backup destination detection
Event-triggered backups
Performance throttling

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Computer world breathed with relief the moment system backup tools appeared on the market. Until then

there was nothing to create a bit-by-bit image of the system drive. The only way for a clean operating system to reside on your computer was re-install. This operation, though very easy for some, took a lot of time and the process was among the most despicable for computer users. With the introduction of Vista and the new technologies on the loose, everything is a whole lot easier. However, backing up one's files (especially system files) is an unavoided task.

Restoring the operating system to a clean state is just a matter of minutes and the hassle with booting from a CD/DVD, configuring the network settings (operating systems lower than Vista), typing in the product key (that's the part I hate most when performing a clean Windows install) is eliminated.

Additionally, after installing the OS the fun part begins: install all the software you need and configure them the way best fits you. That is actually the most time consuming part.

The great deal of products up to the system backup job only encourage you to pick one and save yourself time and effort. One of the oldest such tools (and one of the most used), is Norton Ghost. Its system backup abilities are worldwide known and despite the abundant competition it has to face it still manages to find way on a significant number of machines.

The 12th edition from Symantec comes as a 30 days trial version for testing its capabilities and the price tag for the full version reads $69.99. Regarding the interface there is not much changed but hey, the Vista support has to be appreciated.

The functionality of the application is well known and its improved backup options include file and folder backup, one time backup, automatic detection of the backup destination or event triggered backups.

For a first time the looks and messages displayed by Norton Ghost may be pretty scary as you will be presented with the current backup status. Being the first time using the application results in showing the "At Risk" message. The remedy is of course backing up and creating a recovery point. In the lower half of the Home screen you get to proceed to an action, according to the status of your computer. Both backup and recovery options are available but you will have to start with the beginning and make a backup in order to have where to recover your computer from.

Opt for Run or Manage Backups in order to proceed to safeguarding your data. Norton Ghost will allow you to create backups of any file, folder or drive you want. The Easy Setup dialog will pop up and you can define every aspect for the backup. The two options are for backing up the computer and for backing up the documents. Selecting the drive to be saved, naming the backup job and scheduling the job to take place at a later date and time are the choices for you in the Backup My Computer section.

For Back Up My Documents the options are slightly different as you get to select from My Documents folder what to be saved (i.e Favorites, My Music, My Pictures, My Video folders, etc.). It is not the time for a customized job, yet, that allows you to select any file and folder on your computer. For this there is the Custom bottom in the right lower corner of the Easy Setup screen. The wizard is extremely user oriented and upon selection of the files to include in the job. The choices at the bottom of the screen let you add entire folders, files or file types.

After all the settings have been made you can opt for the job to run according to the previously defined schedule or to take place immediately. Choosing the latter results in opening the Progress and Performance window, which shows the advancement of the job and allows you to adjust the performance slider so that other programs can have a quicker response time. Of course, dragging the slidebar from Fast to Slow will significantly decelerate the backup job progress.

The Status window shows all the drives that have been backed up and may I say that the initial "At Risk" message in the Home screen will not disappear until all the drives have been backed up. The user can invoke the backup wizard for backing up the data on the disk from the context menu. The flexibility provided by Symantec in this product allows the user to customize the status reporting by viewing the full report, show only the errors or choose no report at all.

If there is backup there must be a way to restore those files to the original location. The option is available in Tasks menu under Recovery section. Strangely enough, upon invoking the Recover window there are displayed all the recovery points the application has made, including those that are no longer existent (for the manually deleted backups). Recovering from them would have been a miracle Norton Ghost is not keen on performing.

In the counterpart section (Backup) there is the newest feature added in the program. One Time Backup will create a one time independent recovery point as opposed to the regular recovery points which defines an incremental backup of the files. The issue at hand here is that refreshing the information on the drives' sizes is done only by restarting the application. I ran a backup job and then I wanted to make a one time backup. The values for the size were not refreshed automatically and on the destination drive of the backup it seemed that I was using only 88.6MB of space whereas the properties window of the drive clearly showed a 4.7GB space usage.

Copying the recovery points from one destination to another is a walk in the park due to the built-in wizard. It allows setting the compression level (Standard, Medium, High and None) and in the Advanced Options there is the possibility of dividing the resulting file into smaller pieces to simplify archiving and to set a password (the encryption is AES, 128-bit, 192-bit or 256-bit).

Moving onward to tools there are five titles at your disposal. Out of these for two of them "you may need to license the product" (that is what the restriction message says). These are Convert to Virtual Disk (converting a recovery point to a virtual disk format) and Copy My Hard Drive (creates a copy of an entire HDD to another).

Copying the recovery point to a different location (local) then the one originally defined proved to be a very easy job for Norton Ghost. Its ability to copy the image file to a CD/DVD media may be a little difficult though as the my recovery point was a bit too large for one DVD and the software asked for another one, spitting the first one after filling it. Upon inserting the second DVD the job refused to advance to the finish. There was no prompting that the operation failed or and error message. The progress bar simply froze. After 10 minutes of waiting for a resume of the job I pressed the Cancel Operation button and waited some more (about 30 seconds).

A second test involved backing up enough data to fit on a DVD5 disc. Though the process took quite a time to complete, it was finished with no errors. However, despite the fact that the software showed that the operation was a success, the disc had not been written one bit.

Recovery Point Browser tool instead is simply fantastic. It lets you take a peek inside the backup file, recover only certain files and folders and even launch them. The feature comes in very handy when you want to recover only some of the files included in the entire backup and restoring them to any local residence is extremely easy.


The Good

Norton Ghost does a hell of a job with backing up your files and managing them. Also, the Easy Setup feature gives the software the ease of use any user desires.

Recovery Point Browser is definitely an asset not many similar utilities are equipped with. The recovery of the files is easy and pretty fast, too.

The Bad

In what concerns the copying the recover points on CD/DVD Norton Ghost fails to deliver the user the necessary information for preparing a certain number of discs.

Refreshing the amount of data used on a disc immediately after the operation is complete is not done automatically. The user has to restart Norton Ghost for a glimpse at the accurate values.

Backing up the system drive was extremely easy. But proceeding to creating a backup of files and folders was a real ordeal. Not only did Norton not create an image of the entire folder, but recovering it file by file took more than I expected (there is no elapsed time counter available).


The Truth

Norton Ghost is excellent for running backup jobs of the local drives. Copying the recovery points to a CD/DVD disc however may result in utter failure.

The software does a good job at creating "safety nets" for the drives available on your computer, but with the same job applied to the folders there is a different, time consuming, tedious thing.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: