Backing up data – whether a selection of important files or an entire hard drive – remains an important chore in order to safeguard irreplaceable information.

With a well-designed utility the process should be less of a burden, for example by automatically backing up in the background with little drain on system resources. This is just one of the benefits of the latest version of Norton Ghost, a complete solution for the task of preserving your data against loss.

Norton Ghost 14.0's core use is to make full system backups, for example to a disk image which can be used to restore an entire PC; or incremental backups, to update only those files that have changed.

New features added since the previous Ghost 12.0 (Norton is obviously not tempting fate by releasing Norton Ghost 13.0... ) include FTP backup, Google Desktop integration and Symantec ThreatCon integration, the latter designed to have additional automatic backups triggered by a cue from Symantec's malware intelligence-gathering resource.

We used an external USB drive and Norton Ghost 14.0 to back up the contents of a Hi-Grade notebook running Windows Vista Ultimate, and found the software worked mostly as advertised.

Norton Ghost 14.0 could make a complete backup of the drive, as well as perform incremental backups either by schedule or on demand. Using an external USB 2.0 drive did present a problem, as Norton Ghost 14.0 would not always allow the drive to be safely ejected, even when the program was closed.

Also, on occasion when the USB drive was connected with Norton Ghost 14.0 running, it would ask if it could be used as new backup destination, even though it was already configured as the primary backup drive.

Another Norton Ghost 14.0 feature we tested was LightsOut Restore, which creates an extra bootable system on the PC's C drive.

After setting up, an option is added during booting and after the BIOS screen, to allow you to boot from the Symantec Disk Recovery (SDR) installation and thereafter restore the entire disk from a recent backup.

In our tests, Norton Ghost 14.0 did not show the connected USB drive containing the backups, which rather defeated the object of this feature.