Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

Here is our review on the Norton Ghost 14. As I reap the benefits of not losing data and having a back-up system in place, but have no technical experience, Im calling on my techie husband (hes a professional IT guy) to give you the technical run-down from a pros view: Want the ability to preserve those treasured photos or the video of the babys first steps? Need to recover the computer from a specific time and day when it was working correctly? Then youll want to checkout Symantecs Norton Ghost 14. Norton installed without any problem. I set it to back up the entire Photo directory (30gb) which it completed without any problems. The user interface is clean and easy to manage backups by date and time. The scheduling feature is great for those unattended weekly backups. Ghosting the entire drive to another drive (160 gb to a 500 gb in about 1 hr, both SATA), the process completed, but the O/S kept trying to register itself with Microsoft as if it were installed for the first time (yes, even after the original primary drive was removed from the system). I didnt have this problem with the stand alone version of Ghost 2003 (requires boot disk). Recovery point(s) work like file folders, each backup becomes a recovery point with all the data from the backup stored in the folder. This is handy if changes were made to the system between backup and something went wrong. Just go to the last working restore point and you are back in business. This suite of backup and restore tools are great to have on hand for any system as they are easy to use, easy to install, and provide a easy to follow approach to managing system maintenance.

I give it one star for price. I purchased a Western Digital external book drive to use as my backup device. Turns out I needed to reformat the book drive from FAT to NTFS to get the backup to run. But you dont get a message telling you that. Instead you get something about unable to connect to services??? So after uninstalling and reinstalling Ghost, which also requires an uninstall and reinstall of my Norton AV, I got smart and search the web for an answer. Found it, reformatted my drive, and the backup started working correctly. That only took 2 days of my time. Then theres the recovery disk. Kept getting an error about unable to erase the CD. Other programs had no problem with the CD. Was wiser this time and researched it on the web first this time. Found out some gibberish about reloading the driver for the program used by Norton to interact with the drive (I have a brand new Dell laptop). Did that a couple of times and finally got the program to create a custom recover disk for me. 1/2 a day there. Still havent tested it yet. Not a program for the faint of heart or the inexperienced PC user. I can usually muddle my way around but not with this program.

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!

No longer using norton.

I consider myself has having average computer skills. In the early 90s I used to regard an afternoon chasing an IRQ conflict as good fun. Half the fun of new peripheral was the weekend spent getting it to play nice with Windows 3.11. But there comes a point--- I installed Norton Ghost 14 (I had in the past used Non-Symantic ghost to transfer a drive image and an earlier version-- much earlier version-- of Norton Ghost to back up a work computer-- I think I probably still have a 25 CD backup set somewhere although the computer is long gone. Recently however, I have been backing up the essential files on my computers to a partition on a 500 GB hard drive, scheduled to synchronize in the wee hours of the morning. However, I have always been a belt and suspenders sort of person when it comes to my data. When I first installed Ghost it let me know at once that I had a problem with my RAM. Instead of the 518 MB I had last week, it detected 448 MB. A quick check of my system shows that Ghost was correct although there apparently is a bug that can cause the RAM to show less. I think that probably having the minum RAM necessary is a bad idea. It allowed me to complete the install but warned me that certain resources may not work due to the RAM issue. I then ran the driver validation and discovered that two of my drivers were not available in the Symantic, one was a USB Linksys Wireless-G USB network adapter. The second was a Packet Scheduler Miniport. Neither essential to getting a computer up and running after a disaster so I save the log as text file to deal with later. Im not going through all of the various parts of the program because there are a lot of features, but I would urge everyone who buys this to check the Read.me file for known bugs and conflicts. UPDATE: Had I only known then what I know now-- some weeks and one hard drive format later I have to say that I think I was too sanguine about this program. My computer began to act up with mysterious slow downs and restarts. I run pretty good antivirus, spyware and malware protection , in addition to using Firefox with No Script (Java, Active X, and Flash off). However, I began to worry that something might have got through and infected my machine, so I took it for a look-see. They couldnt figure it out-- or didnt want to spend much time figuring it out so I just had them reformat my harddrive-- just shoot me next time I let someone else work on my computer. Luckily I had my second back up so I was able to save most of my important files because Norton Ghost 14.0 sure didnt restore.

I have an older pc with an outdated version of Windows XP. After contracting a virus that forced me to wipe my computer clean, I decided to get Norton Ghost because I dont want to have to call Microsoft every time I need to reinstall the operating system. Its the peace-of-mind in knowing that even after a catastrophe, I can restore my computer to a save point. I havent had to use it, yet, though, knock on wood.

works

Ive been a fan of Norton products since the old DOS based Systemworks days and have also been a fan of their antivirus product. In the past few years, theyve made some acquisitions in order to offer complete security products. Their firewall didnt play nice with the antivirus so I ended up dropping them for competing software. With Ghost, I decided to give them another chance to see how it does backing up my hard drive. I have to hand it to them, the process was simple and smooth and easy to understand. For a simple backup program the procedure was painless. Backups using Ghost are much quicker than straight copying. I was able to copy about 100GB of data in about 30 min and the resulting images take up about 20% less space. They also include options to backup your My Documents folder and MSIE favorites links (why no Firefox?) If you believe your computer was infected with a virus, you also get an antivirus scanner as part of the recovery tools. That said, it has to be Norton AV in order for you to get the most recent updates or youre stuck with the older scanner on disk. Another nice feature is a driver verification feature that scans the drivers in your computer to make sure any necessary drivers in your computer are included on the recovery CD in case your computer fails. If something is missing, you can burn a custom recovery CD that will include all the drivers you will need. Scheduling backups is a simple and easily configurable process but they want you to image your backups. A drive to drive copy utility is included but it doesnt seem as automated as the imaging process. Plus youre not allowed to use it during trial mode. They do include utilities that assist you in copying to external drives or an offsite location via FTP. Another utility is included that will browse your image if youre only looking to recover a few files or folders. As long as your computer will boot from CD you should be able to start the recovery process via the recovery CD. Gripes: 1) My firewall kept notifying me Ghost was trying to connect to the Internet during the installation process without giving me a reason why. My refusal likely added a few extra minutes as it sat there trying to connect. Eventually it did install without problems. 2) Micro$oft has included a security feature which will cause the recovery to automatically reboot after 72 hours. In other words, you only have 72 hours to fix your problem if a drive fails. 3) In spite of all the recommendations about testing the recovery there doesnt seem to be any real way to verify backups were done properly unless you do a complete recovery. These seems strange to me but perhaps Im missing something. 4) Once installed Ghost is always present and running. They dont give us the option to shut down the program manually. While I didnt experience any problems, if it turns out the program or one of their running processes interferes with another one of your programs, tough luck for you. 5) Not allowing you to test the drive to drive copying method before registering is pretty retarded. UPDATE 3/22/09: The subject of restoration I wanted to address this issue specifically since this is where Ghost is getting a lot of complaints. Restoration does work, at least for my aging system and its EIDE hard drives. However the process itself is confusing and not very intuitive, much of the problem is caused by the program itself. I had an opportunity to play around with the program extensively as one of my hard drives failed. With a new hard drive and a lot of extra space to work with I decided to see how well it works restoring my Windows XP system. I started by making a number of incremental backups of my system drives. I then restored the latest incremental backup to a formatted drive and the complete system transferred successfully and was able to boot. The problem I had was, once the restoration wizard started, there was no way to get additional information from the help files about the process unless I cancelled and started over. Yes, even a simple help button was missing. This can lead an unexperienced user to make a number of mistakes, i.e. Restore original disk signature? Uh.. I dunno. Another retarded exclusion by Norton. They need to expand on what happens when you do or dont select each option. Ghost needs to guide the user through the process, not assume they know everything. Finally, once the process was finished I also noticed the drive letters were rearranged in my system. This may or may not be the fault of Ghost as Windows XP has an annoying habit of doing this, but it can create problems with programs that are searching for files or folders in a specific drive letter. Once that was fixed (Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management) the recovery worked fine. My experience with drive-to-drive copying was not so successful. Perhaps that was why they didnt let us test it out in trial mode. The copy was performed successfully, very quickly in fact (about 17GB in 9min), and the system did boot. The problem was the system drive became a different drive letter. Frankly I dont even know how to get the drive back to the standard C:. It even stuck the system paging file on one of my other drives that was renamed C:. There also seemed to be some problems accessing the boot.ini file using the tools on the recovery CD. Any time I tried to access the file the program would crash. So where does this leave us? At this point Im torn. I do like how quickly the backups are done and the compression done by the imaging system is nice in saving space. My initial experience shows Ghost does recover a system drive with some fussing. However I have been using another program called Casper XP for years. It does exactly what you want it to do, copies a partition or an entire drive without any hassles whatsoever. You dont even have to change the cables around inside your computer. If your main system drive has a problem, simply make your other drive the boot drive (usually a simple change in your BIOS) and everything boots up perfectly. Until Ghost finally gets it right and works as well as Casper, I dont think Ill switch. Since Ghosts imaging system does save disk space, I may keep it around to backup nonessential files on a periodic basis. Hope the review helped.

I needed some help to partition my drive, but the end result is great, and I can rest easy with any fear of disaster.

Norton Ghost 14.0 was very easy to install and perform a image backup with. I picked Norton Ghost because of years of flawless performance from the product. Many backup programs make back up files, but recovery is some times a mistery. Not with Norton Ghost.