Symantec’s Norton Ghost product has long been a vital tool in restoring entire disk partitions to damaged systems or moving the contents of whole hard drives in bulk from one disk to another.

Save & Restore, also from Symantec, builds on this technology and adds several useful features while simplifying the whole process. Now, you can back up and restore individual files and folders and perform incremental backups.

The install CD can also be booted into a recovery environment to allow you to repair systems that won’t start up.

The initial wizard-based setup installs the software with a set of default options that will see to it that your PC is backed up at the end of each working day. Just clicking a few 'OK' and 'Next' buttons is enough to afford you protection.

Scheduled and more advanced backups are also given plenty of automated assistance. You can choose to back up particular files or folders, for example My Documents.

You can also select a particular file type such as Excel spreadsheets and have all such files automatically saved regardless of where they’re stored on your hard drive.

When you encounter problems with your PC that you can’t fix, Windows’ own System Restore function lets you restore your computer to a specific time when it last worked.

Norton Save & Restore takes this concept a step further by creating recovery points that you can browse and from which individual files can be restored.

Booting from the recovery CD launches an interface that’s very similar to the installed, Windows-based product. It’s easy to use and incorporates many useful disk utilities including a virus scan that can be updated with supplementary virus definitions previously downloaded in Windows.

If you’re worried about the safety of your irreplaceable files, Norton Save & Restore is a quick and easy way to gain peace of mind without a lot of hard work.

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