Whether you use a local hard drive or a network resource, plan on dedicating more than half the size of the source disk to the compressed image. Though Ghost 10 compresses data, you still need a suitably large backup destination to get the most out of the program. If you have a lot of media files on your drive partition, you could end up with large image files. That means you can't perform a daily backup of work documents to a DVD-R drive, for instance. Unlike many backup solutions, Ghost provides no way to back up only specific folders or file types it backs up complete drive partitions only-ouch. Norton Ghost 10's complete image backup is both its greatest strength and its greatest limitation. If the backups slow down your system too much, a handy slider lets you trade off speed for performance. Though the complete backup can take up to several hours, we found the iterative updates much shorter. The software can create restore points based on trigger events, such as installing a new piece of software or adding a certain amount of data to the disk.īy default, the software creates a complete backup once a month and performs daily updates of the data that has changed. You can also restore your entire disk to the state it was on a given day. It lets you easily explore the contents of your disk as it was a day or a week ago, retrieving older versions of files that have changed or been deleted. Norton Ghost 10 can also serve as a time machine. You can even retrieve a file from a few days ago if you don't like the changes you've made in the meantime. It lets you recover from serious mishaps, such as a virus infection or a hard disk crash, or more minor troubles, such as accidentally deleting a file or a folder. The software's clever design gives you a great deal of power and flexibility, creating a complete backup each month and updating that backup daily. Norton Ghost 10 delivers a slew of new features and usability enhancements-users of Ghost 9 will definitely want to upgrade. In fact, this feature is similar to the System Restore functionality included in Windows ME and XP. You can boot your PC from it and use its familiar Windows-style interface to restore your PC to its previous running state. In case of a real disaster, the Ghost installation disk also serves as a recovery disk. The Ghost 10 box edition includes a copy of Ghost 2003, the last iteration of the DOS software, but Ghost 9 and 10 are now Windows based, thanks largely to the DriveImage technology Symantec acquired when it bought PowerQuest in 2003. Those with long memories may recall earlier versions of Norton Ghost, a DOS-based disk-imaging utility aimed mostly at system administrators. Users of Ghost 9 will definitely want to upgrade to version 10. These make it a unique and powerful backup application, even for novice users. Norton Ghost 10's usability and feature enhancements include data encryption and better tools for managing backed-up data. Realizing this, Symantec has transformed Norton Ghost 10 from a mere disk utility into a general-purpose backup solution, clearly distinguishing it from Acronis True Image 9. However, with the advent of large, inexpensive, high-speed external hard drives, it's become an ideal way to create robust backups that can get you up and running quickly if disaster strikes. Disk imaging, a process that creates an exact copy of a hard disk's contents, used to be the exclusive domain of system administrators, programmers, and other techie types.
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