Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

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.

As an IT professional I can make Norton Ghost perform the tasks I want it to do. I was able to backup my internal 100GB hard drive to my external 500GB drive without too much difficulty. I have never found a product that does a good job with backing up everything, including the OS, and restoring it good as new with little effort, so I wasnt too surprised to see that this product fails in that area too. Personally, I think people are better off using WinZip to backup critical data to an external medium than using something as hard to use as Norton Ghost. Just expect that when your HD dies, youll need to get a new one, format it, load the OS and your apps from source media, then restore your files from the WinZip backup files. This approach is FAR more reliable than supposed one-step solutions like this one.

Did not live up to hipe. Too difficult to use and too slow to do the job. Look elsewhere, for a good backup and clone program.

I have enjoyed using Ghost 9, and for some stupid reason, decided to upgrade to 14. It installs a menu system that dumbs down and limits your options. Major problem using if you have an IDE, SCSI, or SATA drives, especially if you installed a Promise type card to get more drive slots. If you need support, all their 800 numbers go through (even during USA daytime) to India or Philippines for support, and they are all following scripted answers. If you try their CHAT they want to have you install software so they can remotely control your desktop in every case, and they still dont fix the problem, or know what is going on. The Gear Software drivers do not work in many cases. If you have other products that use drives/burners like Nero, AnyDVD, etc., you will have conflicts. The price at Nortons website is $70 and it will take more than 10 days if you select the most cost effective method of shipping box. I have wasted almost 5 hours in chat, endless on hold, ridulous telephone routing qeues, and there are no phone numbers to speak with anyone at Symantec in the USA. I will never use another Symantec product again for the rest of my life...and returned this Ghost 14

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.

] Norton Ghost is supposed to be a top-of the line backup program. I got it from Amazon for a steep discount. It requires matching the drivers on your computer to the drivers contained on the software CD. IF your drivers dont match or if your CD/DVD drive does not use GEAR technology, you cant perform the function I bought the software for -- creating your own system recovery disk to recover your system in the event of failure. This version is supposed to have both 32- and 64-bit drivers on its disk. it apparently had some 64-bit drivers, because I passed its driver validation test with the exception of my WAN miniport driver. My system is 64-bit. The program told me that I couldnt create a system recovery disk because my drivers didnt match the drivers on the Norton Ghost disk (32-bit drivers). It wanted me to add my own 64-bit drivers from my own system to its disk. I couldnt find all of my own drivers. If I did, how am I going to know Ive found them all and none were left? Oh, also if you dont have an external hard drive to save backups on, Norton Ghost 14 thinks youre screwed. Also, my CD burner stopped functioning while NG 14 was installed... Tried to send Symantec feedback using their feedback feature in the software and they timed out my connection before I finished. I gave up and uninstalled NG 14.0.

Norton Ghost 14 is a great backup tool that offers lots of potential for scheduling different types (files or full system; local or off-site) of automated backups. It is simple to use, yet offers every conceivable option one could need. As a bonus, it offers its famous ghosting ability to copy full hard drives accross, e.g. when moving to a new PC or upgrading a hard drive. An older Ghost saved me from the effects of a complete HDD crash, and since then I am hooked on Ghost. V14 is the same good product, but even better. GET IT, or face the consequences one day!

Norton Ghost 14 is very helpful to me. it has helped me backup my operating system and files from my computer to an external hard drive in case the computer crashes. im sure there are other features that Norton Ghost 14 has to offeer that i am not aware of. all in all Norton Ghost 14 is a very beneficial product.

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.

I own a Dell Dimension Computer with XP and a lot of installed software and I wanted to move my whole bootable C drive to a new larger drive. The software that came with my new Western Digital drive did not work. (Didnt expect it to really.) So I thought Id just go top of the line and buy this. Big Mistake. I tried Norton Ghost 14 three different times and it simply would not make a bootable copy of my original. (Each attempt takes several hours on a big drive.) The software is buggy and will not do what it is supposed to do. If you want to clone your drive, download Acronis True Image. Acronis worked perfectly the first time. Not only that but the download gives you a 15 day free trial. (If you cant clone your drive in 15 days, youve got a big problem.) Norton Ghost 14 is a big expensive piece of S@*& !!!! Acronis True Image, two thumbs up !!!!