Norton Ghost - what does it do exactly?

[16610lv]

...I'm trying to work out whether it's worth installing on my new Vaio laptop.

Thanks

[16610lv]

ThePassenger said:

16610lv said:

...I'm trying to work out whether it's worth installing on my new Vaio laptop.

Thanks

Basically it takes a snapshot of your drive, dumps it as an image that can be burnt to CD/DVD and when it all goes wrong you can restore the computer to the momment in time that image was created.

Thanks! But my laptop (SZ3) seems to have a built in 'system restore' feature that allows me to restore it to specific way points in previous days. I've already had to use this a couple of times, so it works! Is this the same thing?

[16610lv]

malman said:

No its not like system restore ( if thats what you are using - sony may have some other utility)as that only restores specific files not everything. Ghost takes a snapshot of the entire drive and to answer the hijacker it does it at a level below the filesystem so its not reading files as such just blocks of data that make up the disk and filesystems on it. It is reliable and has a verify option should you wish to check that the image matches the drive

Edit to add that some manufacturers "restore to factory default" disks actually use ghost to do this by having the original system image on a CD. Once used its as if its just come out the box. Having you own copy of ghost means you can create images any time after its out the box and restore to them. You can also explore images using ghost and pick individual files out of the image and just retore the ones you want.

Edited by malman on Friday 29th December 10:22

Thanks for the info - clears things up for me. Think I'll go ahead and install Ghost then.