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Delving into the Norton 2010 line-up

Posted on 18 Mar 2010 at 14:07

Jon Honeyball is impressed with Symantec's new security measures and Norton Ghost

It might be a cunning plan by Microsoft to try to sell more Windows Home Server, which is an excellent product, and allows Windows client machines in the home to image themselves onto the central server. Nevertheless, the removal of imaging capabilities is something that I find indefensible.

Save & Restore 2

Fortunately, Norton sells an excellent product called Save & Restore 2, which I’ve mentioned before in this column. It does a fast job of taking snapshots and allows you to mount them into your existing file system. In addition, it comes with a Windows PE bootable disk that lets you recover onto the bare metal.

Some users have apparently had problems with this PE bootable disk because of a lack of esoteric drivers, but I’d point out that there’s a driver verification test that you should apply to check for any such problems before you need it in anger.

Save & Restore 2 has a big brother in the Norton Ghost product, which has just been improved to version 15. It now supports Windows 7 BitLocker, which is handy for hardening laptops against theft. It supports writing to Blu-ray disks, both single- and double-layer versions, so I can make a 50GB image of a machine straight onto Blu-ray and then pop it into my fire safe.

It can also do cold imaging, which enables you to image a machine without installing any extra software onto it, and I wonder whether I could use this to image a laptop with multiple languages installed and then restore the machine to factory fresh? Most recovery tools in Windows will only recover the current installation, which might not be enough if I wanted to change from English to, say, Flemish on a recovery.

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