Product Reviews

If you have ever faced the troubling task of recovering lost or corrupt files, or a whole Windows installation, you will know that unless you have taken steps before the fact, your chances of successful recovery are slim. Norton Ghost 12 provides a range of tools that take pre-emptive action and preserve files, folders or your entire hard disk, including the operating system and applications, and allows you to restore them in the event of trouble.

The most prominent feature of Ghost 12 is its ability to create an image of your hard disk - a compressed copy of your hard disk called a recovery point - that can be used to restore your computer if things go wrong. Recovery point creation can be scheduled, or set to run when new software is installed, files are opened, applications launched or users log on or off the computer. Ghost 12 allows you to create a new recovery point each time, or just add changes to the original, saving backup time and storage.

Saving a restore point is great if you want to return the system to a previous state, but it's not ideal if you want to recover only a single file. To restore the latest version of a file from an image requires both regular saving restore points and tedious browsing to find the file or folder you want to put back. Thankfully, there is a separate file and folder backup tool that allows you to quickly and efficiently identify files and folders for backup. You can specify one routine to back up just

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photo files, while another creates a backup of your music files and yet another backs up your emails. As before, you can set when and under what conditions you would like these backup routines to take place.

Disk images and file and folder backups can be stored locally, on a separate hard disk or partition, on CD or DVD, on an external storage device or a network location. Restoring one of these points, or files contained within them, from a fully functioning Windows system is as easy as selecting the desired point, but it's on more serious occasions when Windows fails to boot that Ghost earns its dough.

Ghost can be configured to prompt at boot time whether to load the current Windows configuration or restore to a previously saved point using its LightsOut application. This makes it easier to recover from a Windows catastrophe, but also easier for inexperienced users to accidentally overwrite important data by returning your computer to a previous state. For home computers with many users, it would be more secure to use the bootable recovery CD in an emergency. Either way, both options simply load a pared-down Windows interface with a Ghost recovery application, from which you choose your preferred recovery point.

In addition to the core disk image and backup tools, there are some handy extras. One of the most useful enables you to copy the entire contents of a hard disk to another drive. This is great if you are upgrading to a larger hard disk or your current drive is in the middle of a mechanical breakdown. Finally, there is a facility to create a virtual disk from a restore point, which means you can use the restore point as though it was a fully functioning hard disk in its own right.

Norton Ghost 12 is a useful tool both for general backup and system restore tasks. It can get you out of trouble and provides a more comprehensive suite of tools that its sister application, Save and Restore. However, Acronis's True Image 10 does the same job for almost half the price, and remains our recommended backup software.