Hasta La Vista, Norton Ghost !

Finally gave up on Norton Ghost. It seems like a full-featured backup program, but crap, why does it take almost 2 full days to backup mydocuments folder? Never mind backing up the entire drive image. This is unworkable. Back to the drawing board, you Symantec boys. Man, where is Peter Norton? Did he retire to some south Pacific island? He should be on top of these lousy programmers at Symantec. Fire the lot and hire some smart cookies instead. This product, which is version 14 should not be out in the marketplace. Man, this is version 14, not version 1 !!!

Anyway...I evaluated another product not worth mentioning the name. Then I went back to one that I've used before (when it was free). I'm running the trial version now (thank God for trial version -- hint hint Ghost...). This one is called Smart Backup by Jam Software. Here's the link: click here for link.

What this does is basically make a duplicate copy of any folder you want. It saves the folder structure the same as in your computer. Other programs make their own unique files and basically you can't do anything with them unless you use that program. With Smart Backup, it's just a straight copy.

Okay, now the obvious question: Why would I buy this when I can just copy all the files manually to the backup device (in my case and external hard drive) ? Because when you re-run it, it will only copy changed files and not all of them again.

Side Note: some of the free programs don't allow this feature. They copy everything all the time. So, what's the point? That's unworkable as well.

At this point, I'll probably end up with this solution. Oh, one last item...there is an option to save the files as Zip (compressed) and it allows you to password protect the Zip file.