Backing Up and Cloning with Norton Ghost

When I worked in IT for my former company, there was one utility we relied on to help us deploy new computers and operating systems. That utility was Ghost. We discovered the product back in 1997 when rolling out Windows NT throughout our company. Ghost offered the ability to create an image from one computer and clone it to many, sparing us from having to reinstall the same OS and core apps on multiple machines.

 

For its first couple of years, Ghost was owned by a company called Binary Research, but was soon bought by Symantec (News - Alert), which has developed in since then. With the latest release, Ghost version 15, the tool retains its basic functionality but throws in a few handy new features for IT pros.

 

Ghost can serve as both a backup and cloning utility. As a backup tool, Ghost can create an image of a computer's hard drive, allowing you to recover individual files or the entire disk if needed. As a cloning tool, Ghost can copy one drive to another or create a hard drive image that can be applied to another PC.

 

With Ghost 15, you can back up a computer to a variety of different destinations, including recordable CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs, USB and Firewire drives, and network and FTP shares. To aid in the recovery of backed up files, Ghost creates a Recovery Point, essentially a marker for the backup. Ghost 15 includes a new Offsite Copy feature, which lets you copy the Recovery Point to more than one location. For example, I typically back up my files onto a local USB drive because the process runs relatively quickly. But I also copy those files to my NAS drive. With Offsite Copy, I can keep my backup set in both locations and easily recover files from either one.

 

To save space, you can compress your backup set with standard, medium, or high compression. You can also password protect your backup and apply AES encryption to further secure it.

 

Backups can be triggered manually or scheduled to run weekly, daily, or more than once per day. Ghost gives you the option to define a backup set in which you specify the source, destination, frequency, and other parameters. You can back up your computer to an image directly from within Windows without having to shut down or reboot.

 

Recovering your files is easy enough. You can browse your backup set or search for specific files. You can recover individual files or folders or restore the entire image. If Windows gets hosed and you can't boot up at all, the Ghost CD serves as a boot media, allowing you to access your backup set.

 

I use Norton Ghost around once a month to back up my entire PC, and then call on a regular backup utility to back up documents and other changed files.

 

For IT folks, Ghost may be even more useful as a disk cloning tool. The Copy Drive Wizard lets you clone your hard drive directly to a second drive, or save it as an image, which you can then apply to another hard drive. At my former company, we'd build a master computer with the operating systems, hardware drivers, and core apps that everyone ran. We'd then clone that computer and apply the image to each new PC to be deployed to our users. Of course, disk cloning only works if you use the same make and model PC with the same hardware components. Typically, we'd create one Ghost image for desktops and another for laptops.

 

I’ve used different flavors and versions of Ghost for the past 12 years and have always found it a reliable and helpful piece of software. Though you can certainly now use other utilities to deploy an operating system and applications to your network PCs, Ghost is still a handy tool for any IT department.

Ghost 15 works with Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Though the software is compatible with only client operating systems, you can run it on a Windows server using the bootable CD. Ghost retails for $60 but sells on the street for about $40.