While most will schedule the backup to run at a specific time, say 1am when they are not using the system, if the job is running when you need to use the computer, you have the option to adjust the speed of the backup so that you can work more efficiently while the backup is going on, and then speed it back up when you are done.
Then if anything bad happens like a hard drive crash, a virus, or even if your house is destroyed in a fire, as long as you have access to your recovery disk, the most current set of backups, and Ghost, you can recover to the point of that last backup.
If you have multiple hard drives and you do a full backup of your system drive, you may only want some information from the second drive backed up. You can also set it up to do backups of a specific directory, for example your photographs. Then when you add a bunch of new photos you can just run the job and those files will be protected.
So with all this, what's new with Norton Ghost 15?
• Cold imaging now lets you backup files without installing Ghost. This allows you to create independent recovery points using the "Back Up My Computer" feature in Symantec Recovery Disk. Sometimes known as a cold backup or offline backup, you can create recovery points of a partition without the need to install Norton Ghost or its Agent.
• ThreatCon integration leverages intelligence from Symantec’s industry-leading security research organization to automatically backup files whenever ThreatCon reaches a specified threat level.
• Blu-ray Disk imaging gives you the ability to not only back up to DVD, or CD, but Blu-ray as well. Now you can copy your recovery points to any of these media.
• Windows 7 support has now been added to Ghost. Updates have been added so that this version works better with Windows Vista with SP2 (includes Home Basic, Home Premium, Business-Retail, and Ultimate).
• Virtual formats support has been improved to include support for VMware ESX 3.5i and 4.0i as well as VMware ESX 3.5 and 4.0
Article comments
1 - Bob D
Just purchased Norton Ghost 15. The only drawback is that if you're cloning/ghosting an older drive to a newer drive with the intent of *replacing* the older drive, expect trouble. There is NO drive re-lettering feature. Example: Older 80GB HD low on space, want to replace it with a 500GB HD. Normally you slave that 500GB into the system and do your cloning - BUT that drive is assigned (say) drive letter D: (and it will STAY drive D:). Do NOT use the Computer Mgmt snap-in, it will NOT re-letter *any* boot/system drive. And guess what drive letter all your reg-keys point to... I made the mistake of thinking I could re-letter my C: to E:, then re-letter the clone drive (D:) to C: - NOT HAPPENING!! And you've just hosed your C: drive. This means you will hang at the logon screen, *never* getting the logon prompt..! RecoveryConsole will *not* fix this problem. I had to pull the drive, and slave it into another system, launch regedit, highlight HKLM, import hive -> Drive(?), windows\system32\config and the "System\Mounted Devices" key. Changed the key that had "D:" on it to "C:". Unload the hive (MUST DO!). Pull the drive, and put it back into the other system, got on my knees and prayed that it would work - it did... But *what* a nightmare! All Symantec had to do was give the option to re-letter, and I would have been finished in 5 minutes (minus the cloning time). Hope this helps, ~Bob.