| Backup two computers using Norton Ghost |
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My home setup consists of two networked computers: one running Windows 2000 Professional and the other running Windows XP. With a view to enhancing backup and recovery I recently purchased Norton Ghost and a portable hard drive. My intention was to do a full backup of both computers once a month to the portable hard drive, enabling a full recovery in the event of a disk failure on one or both computers. The portable hard drive is large enough to cover the used volume of both hard drives and then some. However, after using Ghost to backup one of the computers to the portable hard drive, when attempting to backup the second computer Ghost overwrites the backup of the first computer – there does not seem to be an option that allows a second image on the portable hard drive. How can I do a Ghost backup of both computers onto the one portable hard drive? I am very glad to see you are implementing a backup system, as this is vitally important. Many users don’t appreciate that computer hard drives can (and do) fail, most often taking all your data along! Therefore, having a backup of your data on an external source is essential. In my opinion, using an external hard drive is the best option for home users given the convenience, ample size of drives and relative cost vs. capacity compared with other alternatives. Using imaging software such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image is a good idea, since taking an image of the computer is often much faster than individually copying files, and also allows you to take a complete “snap-shot” of your computer at a particular point in time. While I do not use Norton Ghost I downloaded a trial version of the software and tried simulating your situation. However, when I setup the backup I was prompted to define the destination of the backup. In addition to selecting the drive where the image should be stored, I could select or create a folder on the backup drive where the images should be stored. For the first backup, I set the destination as E:\BACKUP1 (with E being the drive letter of my external hard drive). For the second backup, I set the destination as E:\BACKUP2. I was unable to actually run the backups (due to data storage constraints on my external drive) but from the setup it seems like the backups would be stored in two separate folders. I am unsure which version of Norton Ghost you are running, but check whether you are able to define specific folders as the backup destinations. Please let me know how this goes, as I am sure other readers will be interested in the outcome. |