What's Hot: Ghost offers two kinds of backup: supported-disc based and file based.
Disc based takes an image of the entire disc and file based allows you to choose files and folder to add to the backup.
Disc based can fill up space quickly so Ghost allows you to define a base backup and then future backups just add in the differences.
Backups can be scheduled based on day, time, and events, such as log in/out, run a certain application, or install an application.
Disc-based backups can be compressed in different levels--it appears that file-based backups are compressed but there is no choice of compression level.
Backups can be converted to VMWare discs; this is useful if you use that application.
Ghost can notify you of errors or backup status in several different ways, including via email or SNMP--useful for network administrators.
Backups can be controlled on other network computers from a single instance of Ghost.
What's Not: There is no option in Ghost to back up files without being converted to their backup format. You always need Ghost to restore the files.
I use Microsoft Virtual PC in preference to VMWare, so an option to convert to those disc formats would be useful to me.
What's Hot: Overall, Ghost's performance is good. There are advanced options for controlling the CPU and network throttling, if you have these issues.
What's Not: There were a couple of times when the backup running on my very fast desktop machine was visibly affecting other applications. This didn't always happen so I am not sure of the issue. When I tried to check Ghost for status it seemed to hang when 'connecting to the backup service'.
Network backup didn't seem to match the throughput I get with simple file copies.
What's Hot: Ghost ships with a help file, which covered all of the things I searched for. There is an online FAQ and knowledge base.
Online instant chat is free for support.
What's Not: For phone support you need a support contract or you can pay $9.95 per incident.
When it comes to backups Norton Ghost does a pretty good job, and it has some interesting features such as the virtual machine creation, but it's in a crowded field of backup software including free programs that come as part of your operating system. Unless you need some of the special features it has, Ghost is probably not worth the money.
However, if you need network backups, complex imaging-based backups, event-triggered backups, Google desktop integration, or other features described in this review, you'll find Ghost is a solid product.
Bottom line: Norton Ghost is a good product; it just may be more product than you need.
