Backing Up… Again (Cause it’s THAT Important)

So my sister posted a comment on my last post about how she is nervous about her laptop getting stolen and losing all of her information on her laptop.  Now I have told my sister time and time again that she needs to purchase and external hard drive and back up her laptop!  She continues to ignore my requests, and thus I will say a hearty “I told you so” when her laptop’s hard drive bites the dust, or she happens to destroy her laptop.  If you are smart though and actually TAKE my advice (I really have no room to talk though, cause I never take her advice about eating healthier) then lets walk through backing up your computer using Norton Ghost.

Norton Ghost is one of my favorite backup utilities.  Here is the beauty of Ghost.  I back up my laptop pretty regularly.  My laptop’s hard drive bit the dust a while back.  The Dell guy came out, replaced the hard drive and then went back on his merry way.  If I did not have a Ghost backup I would have had to re-install all of my programs and then restore all of my files back to their correct locations.  Since I had my backup though all I had to do was restore the image, and it was as if my hard drive had never even left.  With NO effort on my part.

What Ghost does is create an “image” of your computer.  Basically it’s a snapshot of all of your settings/programs/files exactly as they are at the time of the backup.  You can schedule the backups to occur at regular intervals, and you can tell it the type of backup you want to do.

Full Image Backup – This backs up everything on your computer from programs to files, to your background.  It is how you won’t miss a beat in the event of a bad virus, a software install that goes sideways, or even a hardware failure.

Files and Folders – You can also select to just back up your files and folders (specifying which ones you want backed up based on location or even just by file type!)  Say you want to backup all of the .jpg’s on your computer in various folders that they may be in.  Just specify that file type and it will take all of the images from your computer and place them on your external hard drive (or wherever else your backups are located)

Incremental – an incremental backup is a great tool to make sure your backups are always up to date.  What an incremental backup does is back up only files that have changed since the last backup.  This makes the backup quicker, and always up to date.

Ghost has some more great features that you should check out!  http://www.symantec.com/norton/ghost

*GIVEAWAY*

Symantec has graciously given me a copy of Norton Ghost to give away!  Simply comment on this post for your entry!  You can also tweet about the giveaway for one extra entry.  I am also giving away a copy of Norton 360 v. 4.  I personally don’t use 360 as I like a much quieter antivirus program that I can’t even tell is there.  Each is worth about $70!!  There will be two winners.  Giveaway will end at 8 PM on Sunday, April 25th.

GOOD LUCK!  and get that backup ASAP!!

*Disclaimer – I received a free copy of Ghost to review, but I was already using a previous version that I had purchased myself.  I have never used Norton 360, and did not receive a review copy of it at my own request.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I receive compensation if you make a purchase using the links.

Comments

comments