I installed Norton Ghost a month ago version 12.0.2.23036 and updated. I stepped through the process of backing up my entire hard drive (because last summer I had a hard drive crash and it cost me a lot to recover data and install a new hard drive so I thought I'd get ahead of the next problem) and the destination for the back up was an external hard drive
(I think it chose that as the destination because it had the most free space) and I thought all was good.

The program has automatically backed up my main drive according to my scheduler. I opened the main program, Ghost 12 this morning and there is a big red X with a warning "At Risk" and it suggests a remedy, to run the "Define Backup Wizard" which is a hyperlink to start the process. Well it wants to start the whole process as if I haven't already done it. It goes to a menu that asks me to select a complete or partial backup, and asks for me to select a drive...Huh? already done that.

Norton online help is approximately useless so I was hoping for some help here. I'm not an IT guy or anything so let me apologize ahead for my ignorance, I'm sorry. But ultimately I want to find a good complete solution to protect myself from a repeat of last summer.

Thanks in advance.

Oops, the warning indicated that another external HD was not backed up which is fine because I dont want it backed up.

Sorry about hollering wolf about that. Now, can you or anybody point me to a dummies guide for using Ghost? I want two things, 1 to be able to boot if Windows should fail, and 2 to have a mirror of my main drive with the OS so I could recover from a HD failure. I'm not sure that I'm doing that exactly. The Directions/Instructions were pretty brief in the documentation that came with the software and I get the impression that I'm not using it correctly.

The external HD is a 500Gig disk that is almost full and Ghost occupies the majority of it. The file titled "Norton Backups" is 291 GB which is way more than the drive it is backing up. I'm really confused by that, I mean shouldn't the backup files be about the same size as the files being backed up?

I have two backups indicated in Ghost, "My Computer Backup" and "My Documents Backup" which are scheduled to backup on Thursday and Sunday.

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I don't generally have this much difficulty with new programs, if anybody could direct me to some simple answers I would appreciate it.

I appreciate the response and I'm looking over the guide, thanks.

But I still can't figure out why the "Norton Backup" folder on my external HD occupies 272 GB. Thats bigger than my internal "C" hard drive. Not to mention that I have used only 91GB of space. Why on Earth would my backup folder contain 272 GB of info?