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 brought my pc in for some minor work . While I was there I asked the repairman to install Norton Ghost 14.0. He installed it, though he didnt really trust this updated version. Like others have said it does have its flaws. I cant recommend it.

This product has a lot of potential, but when I disconnected my drive one afternoon and Ghost started its daily backup, it spiked my processor and locked up the system. Major bug! I showed the tech support person and he said you must have the drive connected to backup. Of course, but what if the drive isnt connected - crash! Because of this one problem, I decided to try a different backup software.

I was aware of the old reputation of Norton Ghost as being powerful, so i tried installing it. it threw errors after burrowing deep inside my system. all i need is backup software. why is it burrowing deep? ive previously used Windows Live OneCare for incremental backups, and it was reliable. but, since Microsoft is abandoning that backup feature, i sought an alternative. The installation process for Norton Ghost 2009 is very long. too long for something that just does backups. I had my security settings on my system lowered to allow smoother installation, yet it was still triggering alerts. this leads me to believe that its installing things that are not advertised on the package. Ive give up on Norton Ghost 2009 and will now try Acronis True Image. it seems to have a better reputation, and perhaps it wont dig itself deep into my settings. As a side note, I had to do a System Restore to rid my system of Norton Ghost 2009. wonderful, eh?

Product as described received quickly

This is one of the few software apps available that can backup your system AND help you upgrade to a bigger internal hard drive. Usually when attempting to swap out your entire main hard drive (C: drive with the operating system on it) you can only upgrade to an identical size partition, so what is the point?!. Norton Ghost lets you back up your current main C; drive on a separate disk, even a USB drive!, swap out your main drive to a higher performance and bigger drive, and then load your backup to the newly installed hard drive. Norton at this point lets you select if you want to make the new partition use the full new drive size, then it works flawlessly to do what it says. I updated an old laptop with a 32gb drive to a 250gb 5400rpm (PATA) drive and my performance improved 6 fold. Highly recommended. Oh yes, the incremental backups are fast too after you capture the first disk image.

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.

The reviews say it works with Windows 7, but dont believe it. After a reboot it did try to finish, but I wouldnt trust the program on Windows 7.

I have been very impressed by this product, thus far. Typically, computer products only claim to do certain tasks, but this product has succeeded in all of my tests, so far. I used the program without looking at the instructions, to test for Intuitive and User Friendly aspects. I found the program to be completely Intuitive and User Friendly, and I did not have to look at the instructions to accomplish many tasks. I also successfully used the CD to perform Utility tasks, and to save Updated virus definition files! This program makes it much easier to maintain a Windohs machine. I am very happy with this product, though it is a bit tricky if using an external hard drive to restore files. I suggest using an Internal Hard Drive for backups, but techies can use an external without much trouble. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Initially, I liked this program, and it seemed to be a nice tool kit cd (

I have purchased Norton products since the early 1980s and continued to rely on them after Symantec bought out Norton in 1990. Symantec truly earns one star for this dog. Haing had more than one hard drive die on me at the worst possible moment, I really want a product that does what the advertising hype claims hat this product will do. Norton Ghost is disappointing due both to its buggy-ness and to the fact that it now joins many of Symantecs recent products that do not live up to the reputation that this company once justly enjoyed. It works fine until you get comfortable with it then it stops doing its job. You get a small window of opportunity to talk with a human if you have problems with this software then you either search on their knowledge base in vain or use some other form of online support. Then you spend hours a day with Symantecs online tech support attempting to get the program working again. I have owned the product for a year and a half and am now on my third bout of problems with this software. I can do one backup but thats it. To get an updated backup, I need to uninstall Ghost, erase my backup, reinstall Ghost and redo the backup - sort of defeats the purpose. If I dont want to do this, I have to find a few days in my busy schedule of attempting to earn a living to spend with Symantec technical support. The product has worked fine half the time I have owned it. If I add up the value of my time wasted by this product, I could have purchased a new computer and a backup program that works. Save your money, get something else.