Symantec Norton Ghost 14 review

Norton Ghost 12 received five stars in our last disk-imaging software round-up (Shopper 224), so we were expecting big things from Ghost 14.

We were surprised that the interface and core functionality remain essentially unchanged. You can create full or incremental backups of an entire drive or partition, or back up a selection of files and folders defined either by location or type. The image creation and recovery tools are easy to find and use, and the main screen gives a useful overview of your hard disk.

Backups can be scheduled to run at a particular time or date, or triggered by pre-defined user actions. This means you can set Ghost to make a backup every time an application is installed, whenever a specific application is launched, when any user logs on or off and after a certain amount of data has been added to the disk.

Ghost can now react to Symantec's online ThreatCon early warning system, which broadcasts an early warning of virus outbreaks. For extra security, backup images can be automatically transferred by FTP or stored on a NAS device.

At its standard setting, Norton Ghost created a backup image of our test system's 18GB Windows partition in 19 minutes and 38 seconds, and restored it from an external USB drive in just over 15 minutes. Individual files can also be restored from the disk image. A system recovery point browser lets you find files or mount an entire image. Ghost also integrates with Google's desktop search, so you can find files contained in disk images directly from your desktop. This is a quick, effective method of locating files, particularly if you don't know where they were stored.

The additions from version 12 are less than groundbreaking, but Norton Ghost 14 is still a reliable product. However, it is the most expensive product here. Other packages are nearly as good and cost half as much.