If you bought Norton Ghost 12 because you heard it was a great way to image a whole drive, you might be surprised to hear it's really a backup application. If you want back up you may wonder what use there is for Ghost's imaging program. This duality may be enough to make you look elsewhere.
Introduction
I'm an old-school PC guy. I remember when Norton Ghost was useful for cloning an entire hard drive. This came in handy when you needed to get your PC back into a fixed configuration, maybe for system testing or for building an office full of identical PCs. But the current version of Ghost appears to target folk who just want a backup of their hard drive documents. Users looking for a real disk-imaging solution that delivers more functionality, and an excellent user interface should check out Acronis True Image 2009, the Bright Hub review is available here.
If you are one of these people you will likely be happy with the simple copy-all-the-files-to-another-place kind of backup solution, for which there is inexpensive, or free, software available. These simpler programs allow you to find your files later, even if they don't allow for some advanced functionality.
Ghost takes a different approach of packing all of the files to be backed up into a single image, which in turn needs Ghost when it's time to read back the files. While this approach allows for smaller backups (via compression), it's a complexity that most backup scenarios don't need, especially when compression formats like .zip are more widely available and would work much the same way.
Ghost has some nice touches, though. In addition to its imaging capabilities, you can mount backup files as if they were additional discs. Ghost also understands writable optical media and other backup type devices, and you can convert your backup files into VMWare discs, which is useful if you use that particular technology. Ghost also integrates with Google desktop search to find archived files.
User Interface Rating
What's Hot: Ghost's user interface is tab- and task-driven and very well laid out. The contents of each tab are obvious and almost all of them use a wizard-type approach to find the options you need.
What's Not: The only realy issue is that some of the wizards are a bit long. Though some of the options are hidden behind 'advanced' buttons it's still fairly complex for a simple backup.
Price to Value Rating
What's Hot: At the time of this review, Norton Ghost cost $70.
If you need a backup system that allows for some of the more advanced options listed in this review then Ghost is a pretty good value.
What's Not: If you're looking for a general backup system, or a hard drive copying program, there are better and cheaper alternatives.
Installation & Setup Rating
What's Hot: Ghost's installation is a standard windows installer. It checks drivers for all your hard drives to make sure they are compatilbe with Ghost and checks for, and installs, any updates from Symantec. It does install some drivers and requires a reboot.
What's Not: I'm always nervous when a program without hardware starts to install drivers. I would like to see an explanation of what functionality I lose if I choose not to install them.
Continue onto the second page to read about the product features, performance, and quality of support.
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