Product Reviews

No matter how new your PC is or how much you paid for it, there's a chance it will go wrong. Your computer's hard disk stores your programs, all the files your PC needs to load Windows and any documents, pictures, music and other information you've saved. If it fails, you could lose it all.

With this in mind, it's essential that you back up your PC regularly. But backup software can be complicated and many people simply don't bother. You could safeguard just a few critical files by copying them to a CD or a flash memory drive, but you might miss something vital. Norton Ghost is a disk-imaging program that lets you create a complete copy of your hard disk. In the event of a problem, you can restore your PC and all its files to a complete working state. If you should ever have to replace your hard disk, this disk image is all you need to restore your copy of Windows, your applications and all your settings.

Version 10 introduces a lot of new features. Although Ghost still works in the same way, there have been some changes to the user interface and the terminology it uses. Backup images, for example, are now called recovery points. You may hear seasoned Ghost users grumbling about the good old days, but the software is now much easier for novices to understand.

We tested Ghost on a desktop

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PC and a notebook with 256MB of RAM, but its installer warned us that our notebook didn't meet the memory requirements. We realised this was due to the 16MB its integrated graphics adaptor uses, and we experienced no memory problems during our tests. After installation, Ghost runs an Easy Setup that creates your first recovery point. You can choose to put this on an external hard disk, in a network location such as another PC or even burn it to multiple optical discs. As this process copies the entire contents of your hard disk, it could take some time. Ghost compresses your data by default, but you'll still need a lot of storage space.

You can use your PC while Ghost makes an image in the background. If you're using a network storage device, a useful throttle option limits how quickly the program can transmit data, reserving some bandwidth for other data, such as internet traffic. Once you have made a complete backup, Ghost updates only new and changed files in future backups. Such incremental backups are much quicker and take up less room, and the software schedules them to happen daily by default. This is the first version of Ghost that also allows you to use triggers such as logging in and out of Windows to start a backup.

It's possible to restore individual files, folders and even an entire disk from within Windows, but if Windows won't load, you can boot from the Ghost CD. The interface looks similar to Windows and there are tools to help diagnose disk problems and check for a virus infection. Strangely, the system clock on both our test PCs was set back by an hour each time we booted in this way.

Ghost is the best backup product we've tested and is ideal if you're new to backing up. It's powerful but easy to understand and comes with a decent printed manual. If you already have Ghost version 9.0, the incremental backups alone are sufficient reason to make the upgrade.