Ghost or no ghost?

[Philippe]

I was excited to learn that I could back up all my goodies on my laptop, which came equipped with a DVD recorder. I'm not reading good reviews on Norton Ghost on the Net, however, saying it is for PC pros, only, etc. That definitely does not describe me. Any opinions? What is the best way to back up my computer? Thanks.

[TwoRails]

Ghost can be a little frustrating, but it works well. One thing to consider is that it comes with Norton System Works Pro and that can be had for under $20 at Newegg.

But you may want to give more details on exactly what you want to do. Ghost "can" do backups, but it's not really a back up program in a sense. If you want to burn an image of your whole drive or just a partition, then that is what Ghost does best. But then, you can probably d/l your hard drive manufacture's utilities which normally has an imager included.

If you just want to back up photos, or "My Documents" or the like then there are better ways to go.

TwoRails

[Philippe]

Thanks for the response, Two Rails. I'm just now trying to get a handle on this. Up to now I have only backed up small data files (Word) and a few miscellaneous items. After having reformatted a few times I was hoping to ease the recovery process, but if Ghost is difficult, I don't know if that will cut down my recovery time, but maybe I am wrong about this. Now I am doing quite a lot of music on the computer, so the files aren't so small anymore. Still now that I have graduated to the land of CD/DVD recorder, maybe I can still keep it simple. You say if it's a question of data backup, there may be better ways. Are you talking about CD-RW? Would you recommend using the backup utility? Thanks.

[glc]

For backing up a lot of files on a recordable DVD, the burning software that comes with the recorder is sufficient, use a DVD RW if you want to be able to reuse the disk.

Ghost is primarily used to back up an entire hard drive image for a complete system restore.

What you could do is partition your hard drive - install the operating system and programs on one partition, and keep all your data files on the other one. Then you can Ghost the first partition and just manually back up all your data files.

[Philippe]

Again, thanks for the replies. Why is DVD-RW better than CD-RW for backups?

[TwoRails]

I believe the reference to DVD-RW is for when the amount of data is very large. I still use CD-RW for "small" data backups, like my personal phone book, email backup, and the like. DVD-RW media is good for larger stuff like .avi files or a large number of files. I also tend to use CD-RW even if the data will fill several discs simply for compatibility: not everyone has DVD players (yet).