Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

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

I upgraded from Ghost 9.0 to the latest version Ghost 14.0 just prior to receiving my new Windows 7 computer. I was totally p****d when I learned that I could not access my backups on my external hard drive with Ghost 14.0. After contacting Symantec I learned that they are working on Ghost 15.0 but could not supply me with a date (this occurred approx.Nov.12) I will NOT buy 15.0, because Win 7 has a decent integrated backup. :-)

Vista Home Basic and Home Premium users were unfortunately ripped off when the product didnt come with a standard backup feature built into the operating system. Thus, solutions like the legendary Norton Ghost. - First good news is it installed within minutes on Vista x32 and x64 - Second good news is backing up to my external Maxtor One Touch was flawless. It backed up nearly 200GB in a little over an hour. - Third piece of good news is when making the Symantec Recovery Disc, you can tell it exactly where to find your driver files and load those onto the disc. But. . . - First bad news is the UI stinks to high heaven. Trying to go the simplified look with high feature rich innovation like of Apple didnt work here. Symantec failed miserably. I had to search online or in the Help more than once to figure out how to use many of the features. - Second bad news, is its failure to restore, which is an essential feature in a backup & restore solution. So many bad reviews on Amazon, but so few of the reviews anyone actually trying to do a OS restore. So you backup your pictures and docs to a USB drive, big deal. A manual copy & paste does that. But restoring a crashed OS is a key feature that should be tested. Suffice it to say, the restore process failed for me like it did for the few others who posted reviews where this was attempted - Third bad news is the online support for actual error messages stinks. If you get lucky and find an obscure message board with a fix, then count your blessings because the online knowledgebase from Symantec needs help for the Ghost v14 product. Im a support manager by trade and every business report will tell you the #1 deflector of calls in to Support is to get online resources. . .Guess Symantec isnt partaking in standard business practices OVERALL: If you need something that will backup your data automatically, this works. But for the price you might try searching Sourceforge first to find a free solution. The worst part, every review that tried to do an OS restore, including myself, was unsuccessful. A key reason NOT to get this product.

For the most part it does what its suppose to do. Excellent for maintianing a Back-Up. Particular problem encountered was; this Ghost works within Windows, with something running in the background that we could not identify and shut off, it would not make a good copy we could use when copying a worn out hard drive to a new one. It would copy but not run (tried three times). Solution; Had to find a copy of older Ghost 12 which works outside of windows, it made the copy, worked fine copying the primary disc to new hard drive, worked first time. We then reloaded Ghost 14 to use as a backup program for new Backup hard drive, works well. This may be particular problem for what we had running, but Ghost 12 had no problem.

I had previously used Norton Ghost product in older versions (around Ghost 5 or so). Recently my parents computer had a hard drive crash. After successfully diagnosing the problem and correcting it, I decided not to trust it in the future... and that I would ghost the old drive to a new, larger drive. I had a limited amount of time, and wanted to get the now running PC returned, so I went over to the Norton site and paid full price for a download version of the software. Ghost 14 is very different than the older versions. First, it installs several services on your system. Second it comes with an iso image for a recovery cd. The recovery cd has no ability to copy a drive. The only way to do it is through the windows drive copy function. Well, I tried this several times and the imaged drive would not boot into windows, and it froze before reaching the welcome screen. After several attempts at re-imaging I gave up and made a few phone calls. One of my friends came over with a CD boot disc made from Acronis which worked flawlessly on the first try. It seems Ive wasted $80 on some useless software. This might be okay if you are looking for a program to automatically backup files to a second or external drive... but theres freeware programs that do that just fine without the need for all the services. PASS on Ghost 14.

I wonder who really needs this product. It is way too complicated to install. Restoration is not flawless by any means, i.e. you cannot count on it working when you really need it working. So, for backup of user files I will just use a simple script with xcopy, and for system restoration go through the complete reinstall: it will guarantee that everything is fine the way it should be.

Ive been using Ghost for backups for a few years now and this version works great. It has saved me from hard disk crashes and possible virus infections (restore to backup just prior to infection). The backups are encrypted, incremental and can be easily copied to portable media for off-site backups (portable USB hard disk). The file-level backup works but isnt as user friendly as the full disk backup. You can even mount the full backups as drive letters for read-only access, and you can import the backup images into VMWare should you decide to turn your backups into a virtual machine. Overall the product is not perfect, but it does work and I would recommend this for someone else to use.

I must admit, Norton is getting better. I agree with most of the other comments below - this version of Ghost is better than previous versions, with much more efficient backup & friendlier user interface. But while it might do a quick, decent backup, it is not reliable in restoring your system. I simply cannot recommend any Norton/Symantec products. And for the life of me, I cannot understand how they have held onto a reputation of being the PC security/backup/recovery company. There are many, many better products out there that are free. Just to name a few security/recovery programs (that every PC user should use): ZoneAlarm or Comodo, AVG, a2, spybot search & destroy, AdAware, and every PC user should download and install the HOSTS files from MVPS-org. For backup, use a combination of these programs, and look on life hacker, boing boing, zdnet, and other forums for a backup/recovery system that works best for you. Do NOT rely on the Vista backup system, either. Or, buy a 1-touch external hard drive. Or perhaps my best advice would be, move to a Mac, or get Linux (I am especially enjoying the new Ubuntu version on my Asus Eee). But I strongly suggest avoiding the temptation to get ANY McAffee or Norton products. None of them work well.

This product works great for backups and for recovering a PC that is infected by a virus. My PC was recently infected by an Internet Virus. The ones that scams you to pay them so they can remove it. I did have antivirus software running but it did not catch the infection, or my family could have said yes to one of those scam popup. The Virus is smart and very elusive so I ended up having to reload windows and spend the next few days putting everything back together. If it happened to you, then you know what I am talking about. If I had Norton Ghost 14, it would have been an hours task. Purchase this software and immediately create and image of your PC to an external Hard Drive. Keep it up-to-date with the Norton utility, and you never have to worry again. Get the CD version so you can boot from the CD to do the recovery. It works and you will be a hero with your family or business. If your PC is infected, or you loaded software that you should not have, just boot from the CD and re-image the PC to the last time you backed it up. Not to mention it works great for normal back and restore functions.

This product failed miserably when installed on my PC running XP Pro. Running LiveUpdate failed and caused the program to stop running (I had to repair the installation using the install disk). Once running, an attempt to back up my hard drive to a DVD-ROM set also failed. Needless to say Im returning the product and will look for another backup program.