Norton Ghost™ Retail Price US$ 69.99 C$ 68.41

FTP backup Offsite backups Google Desktop™ searchable backup indexes Full system backup (disk image) Incremental and differential backup Customizable, event-based backup Advanced compression and encryption

So, you think you're protected against all the threats out there. You're smart enough to run antivirus and a firewall. You carefully monitor what goes in and out of your computer. Nothing can possible hurt you.

And then, BZZZT, lightning. Your hard drive is fried, and you lose years of work.

Don't let that happen to you. Get Norton Ghost. Every computer comes with at least a CD burner, and with the price of CD-Rs so low, there's no excuse to not running a backup solution. Yeah, you could try to copy it yourself, but that's a constant game to stay up to date.

Norton Ghost backs up everything on your computer - digital music, photos, financial documents, applications, settings, operating system, etc. - in one easy step.

When you first install it, it creates an initial backup schedule based on your computer's configuration. It detects storage devices, including CDR/RW and DVD+-R/RW drives, USB and FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices, and Iomega Zip and Jazdrives. Then it analyzes your system, and offers "best practice" backup advice. All during the install, or run the easy setup wizard later.

And then, you're done. It will continually back up your computer to whatever you want. Your work consists of sticking in a new CD/DVD every week. It will make incremental backups, which are backups of just changed files, making all but the first image very small.

But how do you restore? Well, you can boot off the CD/DVDs! On system failure, that brings you immediately back to where you were. No more installing Windows, than Office, then Photoshop, then etc etc...and then trying to track down all the free software you installed off the internet. It automatically watchs for key events like installing programs.

In other words, you can make your own bootable 'system restore' CD/DVDs, like those that come with some computers. And those CDs contain all your data and carefully installed applications, and are as up-to-date as you want them to be.

But that's not all. You can also restore individual files. Did you lose that important file you got a month ago and just now need? Did a program crash while you were saving a file, and now it contains garbage? Fire up Norton Ghost and restore just the files you want.

If you don't want to mess with CDs, you can purchase another hard drive and backup to it. You can get an internal one, or an external one and backup multiple computers on it. You can even get a Maxtor OneTouch and use the 'backup' button on it to instantly protect yourself.

Ghost, of course, has many other features, like monitoring disk space for backups on hard drives, and the ability to encrypt backup so people can't steal your backup CDs. It will display exactly how protected you are at any time in an easy-to-read interface. It's a single-stop solution to a worst-case scenerio.

But you have to buy it before something happens. Either alone, or as part of Norton SystemWorks Premier.