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GCN Home > 08/27/07 issue

Ghost with the most

GCN Lab Review | The latest version of Norton Ghost gets a lot friendlier, while still performing first-rate backup and image restoration

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Ghost has been a mainstay of techies since the early days of desktop computing. But unlike Casper, this Ghost has been anything but friendly — until now.

The GCN Lab started using Ghost as a standard tool in the test lab back at Version 8.0, and off and on even before that. The lab uses the program before software reviews to replicate a standard system image with a very basic configuration onto test systems. This way, we know the exact environment in which a program is being tested and don’t run into situations where we might blame the software we’re evaluating for acting funny when the culprit is another test program previously installed without a clean image. After each software review is complete, we use Ghost to wipe out everything on a test system and restore its plain-vanilla default configuration.

The process is pretty seamless at this point for us lab rats, but it’s not exactly intuitive and did require some training to learn how to build the image files and properly replicate them from the master system to each client. Plus, the program had limited applicability. It was perfect for the lab environment, but standard users didn’t have much need for it.

On the plus side, Ghost has always been reliable. Once you figured out how to use it correctly, it did its job well. By now, we have restored systems hundreds of times and never once ran into a software-related glitch.

So with Version 12.0, Symantec smartly decided to keep that same ironclad, reliable technology but make it accessible to everyone. The features of the program also have been expanded so it can be used as a standard backup program and not simply a way to replicate images across multiple PCs.

The interface for 12.0 is surprisingly clean. You start with a window that has five tabs running down the screen, each accessing different menus — Home, Status, Tasks, Tools and Advanced. The Tools tab is the most powerful and contains most of what you need to start making backups.

From the Tools menu, you can back up an entire hard disk or set what files are to be backed up and how often. You can also create virtual disks to store your backup information if you choose. Most of those tasks are somewhat advanced, but are all presented in an easy-to-use format that anyone can pick up without formal training. You can also manage your backup location from this menu, which is helpful if you need to change the file format or otherwise optimize your backup device.

The Home menu also will show you the status of your backup device and you can do something about it from the Tools menu if you are, say, running out of space. If you are using a CD or DVD-ROM for backup, you can simply change the disk out, but if you are using a supplemental hard drive, the Tools area can help you optimize it to eke out a little more room.

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