Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

The product was ok, but not all it was cracked up to be. I hope new versions are better. Continued licensure is required to reclaim your backups..so be warned.

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

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

WARNING to anyone thinking about buying this product! Please understand that you will not be buying this product only RENTING it. If you do not renew every year the product stops working....COMPLETELY! Im not just talking about updates, etc. It actually tells you that it has stopped working and it wont work unless you renew. I have just wasted more than 2 hours with Nortons online tech support. This is the case with ALL Norton products and I am quoting the tech.

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 bought Norton Ghost 14 to use to migrate my Thinkpad T60 to a larger hard drive. I spent all day trying, only to learn that this product wont do that! I ended up just downloading a free product, HDClone, and it worked perfectly. If you want to do routine backups, you can buy Ghost. If you need to clone a hard-drive with hidden partitions, look elsewhere.

Having used earlier versions of this product in corporate environments, this was almost too simple to use. Perhaps the help files could have a staged method of use (ie: geeks really dont need the detail offered in some pages.) Probably the only thing I would wish for is compression so that an image of 50Gb would not be 50Gb. Highly recommended. (Unless things are PERFECT, I never give the fifth start!) 8^)

I bought Norton Ghost to make disk images in the event I had a disk crash -- which I recently had and spent two days getting my system running again after reinstalling drivers, printers, network attached storage and programs. Oddly enough, the evaluation download from Symantic let me make a backup. Then I bought the full version and suddenly was unable to access the drive that had the backup, even to make another backup, much less restore the first backup. Ghost had a terrible tendency to hang up my computer and freeze all activity. I finally uninstalled the program, but even that normally simple process was complicated for reasons that are still not clear. I would say that this software was a big disappointment.

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.

The first think you do when reviewing software --- know what you are doing. Dont assume that your Flash drives will magically work with the software. Do I think Norton Ghost is a great product that is most likely useful to people on a network trying to remotely back up and image hard drives? Yes. Do I plan to test it when I get my own wireless network set up? Yes. Do I know how to work it at the moment? No. Ill update this review when I get Norton Ghost fully deployed. I will say that I love Norton in general even if this product is a bit confusing. The domumentation doesnt provide much help.