| Product: |
Backup Software in general |
| Date: |
02.06.01 (707 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Works well
Disadvantages: None really
Unlike Norton AntiVirus, it has not harmed my system. On the contrary, this software has been essential in keeping my computer operational.
Norton, a line of products bought by Symantec, has been renowned for their effectiveness in doing their task. Norton AntiVirus, however, did not please my computer nor me and I had to reformat my hard drive before it would work again without throwing up numerous errors. I lost faith in the Norton range – until I came across Norton Ghost.
Norton Ghost is a program I use for backing up my hard drive. The program allows you to make an image file of a whole hard drive or just a partition, and save it in a partition of any hard drive or removable storage. Also it allows the copying of a partition/drive to another partition/drive, and (obviously) the extraction of an image file to a partition/drive.
The user interface is very simple – it is very Windows-like, with a bar at the bottom for information and the commands popping up from a button on the bar at the left. The program checks to see the number of hard disk drives installed and checks the partitions as well. From there, you select what you want to do (e.g. create an image file) using which source (e.g. C partition) and where you want the output to go (e.g. a tape drive). There are many options available – spanning allows you to use a removable drive (e.g. a floppy disk drive although I do not recommend the use of floppy disks for backups!) and the image file is broken up into parts that fit onto each disk. Another useful feature is that all FAT16 volumes can be converted to FAT32 when the destination partition is greater than 2GB, saving space on the destination partition, as FAT16 is considerably less effective at space management for large files.
Once an image has been made, it can be restored with Norton Ghost or a program (supplied) called Ghost Explorer. The advantage of Ghost Explorer is that you can select specific fil
es to extract – you do not need to extract the whole image file just because you need one specific file.
Why not just ZIP partitions as backup? Well, one other advantage of Norton Ghost is that if part of the image file is damaged, the non-damaged files in it can still be extracted. In a ZIP file, if only one error occurs, the whole ZIP file is lost. Also, ZIP files are not efficient for the sizes of hard disk drives today.
Altogether, this is a piece of essential software that should not be overlooked. Remember to back up regularly – if you don’t, you’ll quickly regret it!
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