When you run the program for the first time, you'll be asked to select a backup destination. Choose any healthy drive or partition except for C, or better yet, an external hard disk. After setting the backup destination, define the source-choose Run or Manage Backups under the Tasks menu or the main screen. Ghost lets you back up selected files and folders, or entire drives. Drive backups are called Recovery Points, and are saved with the .v2i, .iv2i or .pqi extensions. The new version of Ghost lets you create drive images as well as file and folder backups (the older versions were only drive imaging utilities), so it's a complete backup solution.

To define a backup, open the Tasks tab in Ghost and choose Run or Manage Backups. To back up everything on your computer, select Back Up My Computer. The Back Up My Documents option will allow back up your My Documents folder, in addition to file types like music, movies and so on. To change the drives you want to back up (or files in the latter case), click on the drive letter (or folder name) in the dialog. The recovery points you create can be copied to CD DVD under Tools > Copy Recovery Point.