Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

I used a prior version of ghost to clone a hard drive in the past and it worked. I bought the 14.0 version and the support site provides a guide (Document # 2008011103205462) for performing the disk to disk transfer. I wanted to clone my old 200gb IDE drive to a western digital 1 tb SATA drive. Ghost did not function as advertised. Ghost could not find the destination drive. Long story short, I downloaded Western Digitals version of TRUE IMAGE from WD website and it did a PERFECT job! Save your money by buying a WD drive and download the cloning software for free.

This did not do a workable copy of Windows Vista hard drive to another drive evan after four tries.

I bought this software thinking it would have more capabilities and functions. Had I not gotten a good deal on it, it would not have been worth purchasing.

Having been a user for Peter Nortons programs for more than 10 years right from Norton disk doctor to Norton PC tools, the Norton Ghost was a major let down. Right now, I am using Second Copy backup to backup data on my laptop onto my tiny external drive - it is simple, does basic things and easy to configure. Although I wish it had more features - the software works great and meets 80% of my needs. On upgrading to what seemed like a more professional better software - Norton Ghost 14, I very disappointed: - Very difficult to configure and use : the menu/UI is hard and not intuitive - My expectation is that I should be able to use this kind of software without having to go through any books/manuals. Even after looking at the help, it is not an intuitive peice of software - Buggy software : I get frustrated to see exception messages flying out from the UI when you are doing even the simplests of the tasks. Overall, stay away from this software - If you are a home user just wanting to backup your videos and photos, you should be able to get some freeware backup software or pay a small price of less than $30 to buy some decent software that really works.

I bought this in order to clone my old disk drive when I replaced it with a larger one. Unfortunately Ghost assigned a different drive letter to the new disk, making it impossible to simply swap the disk drives as all the software was looking for drive C, rather than drive G as Ghost had named the new drive. Norton Ghosts Indian Tech Support was available by internet chat only unless I wanted to pay $1 per minute for telephone support... The Indian support rep had NO idea what to do, and did not seem to understand the term clone, and after consulting his/her computerized telephone script screens finally told me to contact Microsoft for further support. I returned Ghost as defective to the vendor and got a full refund on this useless, unsupported software. While researching Ghost problems on the net, I discovered that you can download a free copy of Acronis from Seagate, the manufacturer of my new drive. It could not have been easier to install and run the software. It cloned my old drive onto the the new drive, and I was able to instantly swap the drives with no interruptions in functionality. Note that Seagates free version of Acronis will search for at least one Seagate drive on your system in order to run. If it does not find a Seagate, youll be prompted to buy the license, but in my case, it had no trouble detecting the new drive connected to a USB port. Im very grateful to Seagate for including such a great tool at no additional charge with their drives!

Unlike the older version I have, Ver. 14 does not include the ability to clone a hard drive over a network.

Ive used both Ghost 12 and 14 for years. For making a backup to an internal partition and restoring it to the original or new drive partition, Ive been quite pleased. Just be aware that to restore your system partition onto a new drive you first have to create and format the partition using the Windows install disk. It is okay if the target partition is bigger than the original, that is usually the point of a new drive. Non-system partitions can be formatted using the Windows Disk Management utility in the Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management section. I have not tried to use Ghost 14 with a networked drive nor have I tried the Copy my hard Drive function that other reviewers complained about. The user interface is not as intuitive as older versions. The Home screen does not include the One Time Backup method that I prefer. I found it under the Tasks icon instead. All the funtionality of previous versions is there if you look for it, but it really pushes the scheduled backups that I prefer to do manually. Once I had it installed, upgraded and working I disabled Live Update. Symantecs Live Update corrupted my copy of Ghost 10 right around the time my license expired. If it works, leave it alone and it will continue to work for years.

Ive been a Norton user for more than 10 years and had never experienced any issues other users reported until I came across Ghost 14. I upgraded from Ghost 12 to Ghost 14 six months ago and had been doing a drive backup every two weeks. Recently my laptop was stolen and when I try to do a restore, I found out certain files were missing from the every archive Ghost 14 created!!! During each backup session, Ghost 14 never gave any indication that some files were not backed up. Luckily the missing files were rarely changed and I was able to restore from the last Ghost 12 archive. Because of this, all my Ghost 14 backups made during the past six months are now questionable. Ive no idea what other files Ghost 14 failed to include in the archive.

I seldom use this product since and switched to another online provider

The only reason I gave Ghost 14 four stars is because during the backup screens you do not see all the partitions on your hard drive in the default configuration. A novice user would not know that other hidden partitions exist on their computer and would probably not backup them. If the purpose of Ghost 14 is to backup an entire computer then the user should see all partitions that exist on their hard disks as the default configuration. Let the user hide any partition as an option since I know hidden partitions are important too. If your hard disk fails you do want everything back including the hidden partitions. In my opinion the menu configurations of Ghost 14 are more complicated than what it needs to be for the average user. Gone are the days of Ghost 2003 when Symantec would allow a home user to backup all his computers at home with a single copy of Ghost. Now we must all purchase one license of Ghost per PC. The only Reason I purchased Ghost 14 was because DELL messed up their bios on my new laptop so Ghost 2003 would not work with their USB ports. Ghost 2003 would allow you to create your own boot CD disks if you knew how to create boot CD disks with Nero and knew how to modify batch files. You were able to boot Ghost from a CD and backup your entire computer to an external/internal drive or burn a CD or DVD backup. Ghost 2003 is still able to backup all my other computers with Windows Vista and Windows XP (32bit and 64bit versions). The Ghost 14 bootable CD only restores images and does not have any backup software available so it behaves like a rescue CD. All backups in Ghosts 14 are conveniently done when logged in to a Windows XP or Windows Vista account unlike Ghost 2003 which requires you to use a bootable CD, USB Drive, or floppy disks.