Norton's Ghost is a tool for backing up and restoring disc and partition images. While it doesn't appear to do much for the money, it will pay for itself in the time it can save in the event of a disc failure the first time this unfortunate event occurs. It stores the complete disc image, so it can be used to expedite Windows installation, for those who wish to spring clean their systems on a regular basis. And operating a PC without saving backups is as wise as having casual sex without protection.

With the launch of Norton's Ghost 2003, the versatility of this already excellent product has been widened yet further, with the inclusion of drivers for USB 1.1, USB2, and Firewire to add to the ability to backup via Parallel port, LAN, USB peer to peer, and internal IDE/SCSI CDR/RW writers. Even more important for users of Windows 2000 & XP, Ghost 2003 can now both read and write to NTFS formatted discs.

In version 2002, the facility to read NTFS discs had been provided, but still it was only able to access drives that were accessible through DOS, which means FAT and FAT32 formats.

Many people buy disc writers for the purpose of backing up their hard drives, but this is incredibly time consuming if you allow Ghost to write to the device directly. You have to sit in front of the machine, with Ghost running under DOS, feeding the writer with discs as it requires them. My own data drive takes 32 discs!

A much better plan is to backup to hard drive in CDR sized chunks, and burn the resulting files as a background task at a time of your convenience. Writing to the hard drive in this manner is not only quick but can be unattended. You could easily manage it in your lunch hour - returning to find Windows up and running again.

You cannot read and write a disc image to the same hard disc partition, it would mean a never ending loop as you add the backup file to the drive and then back that up ad infinitum. So Ghost will not let you even attempt it. You therefore need another partition for the backup.

An obvious solution is to partition the disc, to create a partition large enough to accommodate the content you wish to store. Even better - hard drives are relatively inexpensive, so you could add another. This has the advantage that should the main drive fail, this one is unlikely to do so at the same time, which takes the pressure off the requirement to archive to CDR.

Better still, you could fit an inexpensive removable IDE hard drive carrier to a spare bay on the front of the PC case, which would enable you to remove the backup drive and replace it with another, and to store it away from the PC.

Such is the versatility that this offers, you might like to expand it further by utilizing a USB2 or Firewire port to connect an external IDE box. Or maybe you don't have a spare bay on the front of the PC case? Such boxes can also be fitted with the removable disc carriers.

All that remains is to set the start-up switches that will force Ghost to write the data file in CDR sized chunks, and to automatically rename the supplementary files, based upon what you originally name the backup start file. In the illustration below I have set the parameter -split=690, which is correct for 700mb/80 minute discs. For 74 minute discs set the split to 630. I don't recommend the use of 90 minute discs for mission critical backups.

Select the C: partition (or in the case of separate drives, the disk)

Next select the target file, which MUST be on a different drive or partition, here on the D drive partition of the main drive..

The resulting files (from my laptop C drive) are shown below, requiring five CDR discs for a remote copy.

The whole point of a backup is that one day you may have call to use it. You need to prepare for that eventuality immediately. There's no point waiting until the wheel comes off.

If you can start Windows, then Ghost offers two restoration choices. You can restore individual files using Ghost Explorer, or you can restore the complete image using the restore tool from the Ghost menu.

Note that restoring a complete image will replace everything on the partition with the content of the image file, so keep that image file up to date!

Ghost Explorer is also a simple means of validating the image files. If they are not valid they will not load.

If you cannot start Windows or you are restoring a complete image to a new hard drive then you cannot run Ghost from Windows and you thus need an alternate plan. Fortunately Ghost will also run under DOS, and DOS can be run from a floppy disc or CDROM and provides the means to do so. My choice would be the former as floppy drives are still almost universally available and not all CDROM drives are bootable, but the choice is yours.

Depending on the range of drivers you require the boot disc wizard will require one or two floppy discs. These will start DOS and the DOS version of Ghost, from which you can restore your image, wherever you have stored it.