Main Program Window
Backing up your Operating System Partition
1) First, to run the program itself, from within Windoze:
(You'll usually find it in [START]/Programs/Norton Ghost 2003/Norton Ghost, unless you chose another place to put it when you installed it.)
Main Program Window
Now that you can see the main program window (above), you've got a few options to pick from. For the moment, we'll concentrate on the Backup section.
2) Click "Backup"
This will show you an informational screen to let you know you are in Backup mode (below)...just click "Next >" at the bottom of this screen to continue.
Backup-Mode Information Screen
3) On the left-hand side of the screen, you'll now see a "Source" options listing. This enables you to select either en entire hard drive (you will need two or more hard drives to do a drive-to-drive backup, of course) and each drive is shown with all of it's partitions which are available to be backed up.
The options on the right-hand side of this screen give you the option to back up the partition you have selcted in the left panel to a File. What this means is essentially putting all of the data from the selected hard drive or partition, into an image file, which can be restored later if/when necessary. As it's being written as a file on another hard drive or partition, you'll need to tell it where to store your backup file(s), but that'll come soon enough.
The second option in the right-hand panel is "Recordable CD or DVD". This gives you the flexibility and security to write your backup images to CDR, CDRW, DVD or DVDRW discs. This option has many benefits. One benefit is that it doesn't take up space on your hard drive to store the backup image files. A second--and probably much more important benefit--is the ability to create "off-site backups". Basically, if you can take your backup and store it somewhere away from the computer--or even at another location--even if the house burns down and your computer is completely lost, you've still got your data on those CD's or DVD's!
For the moment--as it's quicker, and people just HATE to waste their time doing things like backups--we'll concentrate on the File method for now.
Source & Destination Selection Screen
Simply click on "System (C:)" listed directly under "Disk 1" to select this partition for backup. Since we're mainly concerned about backing up our "System" partition here, as it stores our Operating System, programs, and for some people, the majority (if not all) of the data they have created since they first installed their computer.
Source Drive/Partition selection made.
If you wished to perform the backup to a re-writeable CD or DVD, now would be the time to select "Recordable CD or DVD"...but for now, we'll go the quick-n-dirty route and leave it set to "File".
Click "Next" to continue the backup process and you will then see this screen:
Target Image Selection Screen
4) Now the "Create a new backup image" screen appears.
If you have not done a backup before, you will want to click "Browse", select a directory on another hard drive or partition, and enter a new name for your backup image. Since the majority of people NEVER do backups, and this will likely be your first, I'll go that route for this explanation.
Click on the "Browse" button and you will be presented with a dialog like this:
Browsing to select your new backup image filename.
Select the LAST entry in the list, as this is the last backup image that you have created. (Or the first...in which case you would now enter a filename that suits the way YOU think your backups should be named...)
Browsing to select your new backup image - Last-created Backup File selected.
Make sure to click on the filename to select it, then click on the filename again in the text entry box below the selection list and change this name to something new, so that you will be making a NEW backup, and not overwriting the existing backup!
You might think that more than one backup would be excessive, but remember: if a backup is ALWAYS a good thing to have, common sense would further dictate that more than one backup is better!
Example: Old backup would be "D:\!_Hard_drive_backups_!\OS_Backup_02b.gho"
NEW backup would be "D:\!_Hard_drive_backups_!\OS_Backup_02c.gho"
or "D:\!_Hard_drive_backups_!\OS_Backup_03.gho"
Filename edited to "something new" to prevent overwriting the previous backup image.
Click on the "Save" button to continue...
New Backup Image file selected...
After you've decided what to call the new backup so YOU will remember it later, In the "Image Description" box below this, just type a little description of what's new in this backup, or if you don't care to, you don't NEED to, because it's already got a bit of a description with the date and time there already...here's an example:
Example Image Description added
Personally, I prefer to at least write down a brief description of any newly installed software, recently removed software, configuration changes, virus pattern updates, or whatever seems to be a good enough reason at the time to create yet another backup. ;)
Once all that's done, click "Next >" to continue...and you'll see the following:
Advanced Settings Configuration Option Screen
The screen above is merely an option to adjust any custom settings for this particular backup. As we've already configured our "Advanced Settings" earlier, it's safe to simply click "Next" and continue on to:
Backup Task Summary Screen
At this point we've selected our Source drive or partition that needs to be backed up, the destination where it will be saved has been selected, and all appropriate Advanced Settings have already been configured. We're ready to perform our backup operation!
NOTE: My preferred "Command line options" are -ghostoncd and -cns
-ghostoncd writes a copy of the Ghost 2003 executable on the first CD or DVD in a backup set, so that even if you can't boot your system, you can still restore the backup, provided you've got a boot floppy!
-cns stands for "Compatible Naming System" and this prevents successive backups from overwriting eachother. It doesn't sound like much now, but if you've done a few backups and had parts of them overwritten before (ie: that data is LOST!) you can easily see why this is an important switch to have set!
The only thing to do now is to click on "Run Now" and let it start!
LAST CHANCE TO ABORT Dialog!
The above dialog pops up as soon as you click the "Run Now" button. It;s there merely to give you one last chance to cancel the backup, or to change Advanced Settings if you needed to do so before but simply skipped over that screen out of habit. (It happens...)
At this point, all you need to do to start the backup running is to click "OK"...and we're off to the races!
Your system will restart in DOS mode, Ghost willl do some background preparation work, restart the system again, and then perform the hard drive or partition backup that you've just started.
On completion of the backup operation, your system will be restarted, and will appear just the same as it did before you ran the backup...only NOW you will have the security in knowing that you have a backup in place, ready to cover your behind whenever the next (inevitable) problem comes along!
Now, there are many kinds of problems that can neccessitate the restoration of a backup, so that's where we're heading next! Click on "PARTITION RESTORATION" to learn how you can use Ghost 2003 to restore your system backup if/when you need to...
INTRODUCTION PAGE and PARTITION RESTORATION
(Please click the operation above that interests you for a quick walk-through.)