Two thumbs up from me.Symantec has recently released the latest and final version of Norton Ghost 15.0, a backup and recovery software, which is now compatible with Windows 7 and provides support for blueray discs. Personally I found the software incredibly easy to use (most Norton stuff is) and the addition of cold-imaging is big news if you have a use for it. Then you follow the instructions on creating an image and choose where to store it for later use – just make sure you have the serial number of your Ghost software handy because it will ask you for this every time you run the recovery program. You pop this CD into the drive of any PC and boot the machine from it (the easiest way is to insert the CD, restart the machine, and watch for the “Press any key to boot from CD…” prompt). To do this you start by using the Ghost software to create a recovery CD. You can’t create this image whilst using the operating system on the disk that you want to image, for that you need to use the “cold-image” feature.

This technique is useful for people like myself who need to use a fresh installation of Windows frequently (I like to start with a freshly installed operating system every time I test out a new video card or CPU, so there’s no clutter on the system that may affect my benchmark results). This “image” can then be copied on to another hard drive to get a perfect replica of the original drive. The other big thing you would use Ghost for is imaging – this is literally taking a bit-by-bit snapshot of your hard drive and saving it as a single file. If something goes wrong during installation or the program throws your whole system out of kilter, you can easily revert to the state the machine was in prior to that installation. Another useful option here is to set a trigger for creating a restore point, for instance whenever you install a new program. You can choose to run a full backup every time or just target files that have been added or modified since the last backup.

These backups can be run manually or you can schedule them to happen at set intervals. Norton gives you options aplenty here with the ability to target your entire drive in case of a complete disk failure, just target specific files/folders, or even select which file types are backed up.

Most of the time you would be using this software for backups – that is, taking a copy of your valuable data and storing it on an alternate drive or disk for future retrieval. Norton Ghost 15 is the latest version in this line and builds upon the basic imaging and cloning functionality of all previous versions, but adds a few new tricks such as cold-imaging, Blu-ray and Windows 7 compatibility, plus support for virtual platforms such as VMware 3.5/3.5i/4.0/4.0i and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtual server format.

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