Norton Ghost is an advanced backup and recovery system for your Windows based computer. You can make a backup of the entire hard disk or limit your backup to only those files and folders that are important to you.
If you found that you lost a file, or a file has been corrupted, you can restore that file or folder easily. If your hard drive crashes, you can restore the entire hard drive to the state at which it was when the last backup was created. Even if you have to replace the drive, you can restore your system including the operating system, applications, and all of the data files.
How does this work? First you have to create a recovery disk CD that will use a driver validation tool to compare your hardware drivers on the Symantec Recovery Disk CD with the drivers that are required to run your computer's network cards and hard drives.
Once you have created and tested your recovery CD, you can then do an initial backup. For most people that will be creating a full system backup of your primary system drive (probably C:). This backup will be placed on another drive that can be an external drive, DVD-ROM, network drive, or some other location not on the primary drive.
Your particular situation and the amount of data that you are backing up will determine your best backup practices. One such option is to do a full backup once a week or once a month, and incremental backups on a daily or weekly basis. Norton Ghost will let you define these backups and then you can set a schedule when it will automatically run. Once the backup is run Ghost gives you the ability to create an off-site copy as well. This means that when your regular backup is done, Ghost will make a copy on another location. This can even be an FTP site for your copy destination.
