A shill for Norton Ghost
If you have to deal with a Windows machine at all, whether it be your personal computer, work computer or one owned by the multitude of family and friends that bring you their broke stuff to hum over and magically repair, I highly recommend that you invest in a copy of Norton Ghost.
I used to be of the mindset that all you needed to do for a backup strategy was to copy the important stuff somewhere. Just grab your documents, pictures and maybe some config files and burn them to a CD now and then. If the hard disk died or if you suffered some viral catastrophe, you could just reinstall Windows and start fresh.
The problem with this approach is that you will spend the better part of a few days downloading all the patches for Windows, installing the software you had, getting updates for said software, getting the latest drivers for your hardware, etc. I’m a busy dude and I don’t have time for all that!
Enter Norton Ghost. Ghost makes an “image” of your entire system – the Windows OS, installed software, your files and all – that can be recovered later. It also allows you to manage a number of backup images and schedule regular backups, including incremental ones. With an external USB drive and a copy of Ghost, your Windows system has never been safer from disaster.
As an example, here’s how I have Ghost set up at home. I have a 200GB disk that currently has about 45GB worth of stuff on it. I also have an external 160GB USB disk to store backups. I set up Ghost to create a backup “set” across one week. On the first day, it makes a complete image; on the other six days, it does an incremental backup of changes since the last backup. These seven backups are a “set” for that week. I have it keeping two sets of backups, meaning two weeks’ worth.
So at 2am on Sunday, my external drive gets a new file around 35GB in size. Ghost supports several levels of compression and could break this one big file into chunks if I wanted. Then on Monday through Saturday, it gets a (usually) much smaller additional file containing any changes since the last backup. It takes care of deleting the oldest set in order to keep only two. Additionally, it can be configured to send you an e-mail if something goes amiss. Pretty easy.
Now, let’s say my machine’s hard disk dies. I buy a new one – it doesn’t have to be the exact same size, it just has to hold the 45GB of stuff – and slip it into the box. All I need to do in order to restore the last backup image is boot with the Ghost CD, point to the image on the USB disk and let it go. In a while, my machine will reboot looking exactly like it did the moment that backup was taken. The savings in time and effort to restore the machine alone make Ghost well worth the purchase. But, the fun doesn’t end with backups and restores. There’s plenty of other good uses for Ghost.
Ghost allows you to browse into your backup images. If I accidentally delete a file and then decide a few days later that I want it back, I can browse into a previous backup that contains that file and then recover just that one out of it.
If someone brings me a machine to rebuild, once I get everything updated and ready I install Ghost, take a backup, then uninstall Ghost (it works for 15 days without activation). More than once, I’ve sent a machine home with someone only to have it come back all too soon with a virus or other problem. Having a Ghost backup of when I last saw it saves me from having to repeat all of that work.
A nice option with having the incremental backups is that I can restore to any one of them. If I get a virus or other problem and I’m not sure when it happened, I can restore yesterday’s backup, then the one from the day before and so on until I figure out when and where the problem started.
The only feature that I can say is missing from Ghost is the ability to look at only the files in an incremental backup. When you browse into an incremental backup file, you actually see everything in the backup set up to that point. It might be useful to be able to see only the files in that incremental backup.
Finally, here’s a tip on using Ghost. Always choose to have it verify the backup image after it creates it, which takes more time but guarantees that the image is good. Once, I tried to make an image of a failing hard drive. Ghost can be configured to ignore bad sectors and skip other problems during backup and it will happily do so, but I found that if the image could not be verified, then it was useless and would not restore.