When using an external hard drive as you noted, is a program like Ghost required to copy my hard drive contents to an external hard drive...?
No , It's not required , but the great thing about a program like Ghost is not for everyday backups , but it can take a snapshot "image" of your whole 40gb disk ,and should you have a major software failure or virus or even have to replace the internal hard drive then that "disk image" can have you back up and running literally in a half hour.It sure beats shuffling CDs for 3 or 4 hours and re-doing all your internet and e-mail settings.
However you have to know how Ghost and other programs like it work to have safe data ,If you call on Ghost to restore your whole computer do to a crash , Ghost will ERASE your internal hard drive and configure it to the state it was the day you took the "image".
If you do a "drive image" on May 1st and have a system crash on July 4th without backing up your personal files in between , then use Ghost to restore your drive you will lose anything YOU created or obtained between May 1 and July 4, (pictures , emails , software or updates installed in that time).
So the best overall solution is to do regular backups of "YOUR" data files , and take an occasional drive image with Ghost, or alternately you could do a Ghost image once a week and as long as your computer is working well you could delete the image files from last month so you don't fill up your external hard drive with old drive images. Always keep the last 2 images you did and always use the date they were done as the file name for the image so you know at a glance when they were done.
FWIW I like Acronis True Image better than Ghost , but I have have a real dislike for Norton products in general.
Ray
