Norton Ghost 15.0 - 1 PC

I have been using Norton Ghost 10.0 for more than 4 years, always backing up the system weekly and diligently removing old copies of backup files to leave sufficient space of the 250 gB external. Recently, my old PC (Windows XP) is infected with a malware or virus FIRMLY attached to Mozilla Firefox. The virus is "smart" enough such that one cannot uninstall the Firefox. I tried Norton Ghost 10.0 but my purchased distribution, designed to use as the boot disk failed to boot. Norton Ghost cannot be used to RESTORE the entire C:\ drive within the windows environment. So, I thought I must purchase one IMMEDIATELY directly from Symantec before my computer consultant comes to visit for the purpose of configuring my 2nd computer (Windows 7). The Ghost restored the system successfully. There were some scary showing some errors DURING the RESTORE process, not exactly "user friendly". But in the end, it did SHOW "Restored Successfully". All the files were restored without any glitches.The first copy of Ghost 15.0 was ordered from a vendor who sold his opened but unregistered copy at very reasonable price. I used that copy to first BACKUP and then RESTORE the enter system on my latest DELL Workstation. Again, it worked very well. The interface like all the Ghost software is not exactly "user friendly". It asks you to identify the same file by date. Then you could also ADD even more files. Without knowing whether the system was backed up incrementally OR a COMPLETE System, I selected 2 files. The result was a great RESTORE, all files are good with this relatively new system.Glad that the Symantec engineers finally did something GREAT following the phenomenal achievements of Peter Norton several decades ago. My sincere thanks to them.

One of the most difficult, scary and time consuming tasks is restoring the OS and apps in case of corruption, disk crash or other catastrophic failure. So I began a search for a "full monte" back up tool so I could restore the disc image and not suffer the time, effort and frustration of the dreaded "system restore" process.Using Amazon Customer Feedback and a few other sources of recommendation and product comparison; I determined that Norton Ghost was the best choice, at least for me.I started with the laptop which seemed to be most vulnerable to virus/malware attack. I also wanted to upgrade the disc drive. The Dell M1330 fit my needs perfectly, but came with a 160Gb disc, fairly adequate in 2008, it became limited as my photo and music libraries grew and apps were added. I finally reached a point when I could not keep any videos on it, just not enough disc space. After consulting with Dell I increased memory from 3Gb to 4Gb (ended up with 3.5Gb useable) and purchased a WD Black 750Gb, 7200 RPM replacement drive. My backup drive is an HP 360 Gb Pocket Drive, which works OK now, but will need to be replaced soon as I fill up the system disc.This is where Ghost entered the picture. On Amazon, it was reasonably priced ($25.34 for the CD version) and delivered in 2 days (there is a download version for $21.20 but then you need to create a recovery disc, no big deal, but with the CD version you have the SW and recovery disc combo on the shelf). It comes with a PDF User Guide on the install disc which I printed out double sided and placed in a binder (I am old fashion and like paper manuals so I can mark them up, dog ear them, etc). I reviewed the manual ran Ghost for about a week to be sure I understood it and created 3 backup points. I checked with Norton to be sure I could restore to a larger drive with higher RPM, larger cache, etc. This was where the first alarm bells began to ring. I could not get a Ghost support person on the phone. After calling Norton support and explaining my need, I was placed on hold for a loooong time. Finally the tech returned and said she could not locate a Ghost tech and would take my phone number and have me called. We even agreed on a day & time. Norton did NOT keep its call back agreement by a long shot. I was eventually called back but at least a day late, resulting in some phone tag. I actually received a call on Sunday during Church. So I slipped out to take the call and asked my questions, which the tech answered competently in a very heavy accent.So I was ready. I installed the new drive but ran into a snag. The documentation focused on restoring the system to the same drive that was backed up. There was a check box that seemed to ask if "additional disc space should be recognized" but this option was not covered in the manual. I called Norton Support again and once again, a Norton tech was not available by phone. I suspended the restore procedure for at least a day waiting for a call back which did not come as promised once again. I did find a chat solution but the tech gave me incorrect instructions and the result was a successful restore, but the system only recognized 160 Gb of disc. Again I rattled Norton's cage for phone support which once again did not come as promised. I went back to chat and got a ghost tech after a long hold. He took control of my computer and used Windows Disc Manager to recognize the larger capacity drive. From there everything has gone smoothly. I am now only able to maintain 3 compressed restore points so a new, larger backup drive is in my future.Pros: 1. It definitely works. The system was successfully restored and runs perfectly. Be sure to include any virtual drives in the back up (like a D: restore drive or an F: tools drive, etc) or they will not be restored.2. Chat support is available but the competence of the tech is inconsistent.Cons: 1. It is not intuitive, you need to read the documentation to successfully use this tool.2. The documentation is not comprehensive. It is missing guidance on some of the restore options and is not well written.3. Phone support is virtually unavailable in a timely fashion and the techs I finally spoke with had very heavy accents.I will buy two more copies of Ghost for my other two computers (only one per license was allowed when I bought it but I now see a 3 computer, 1 user version for ~$30) and now I think I can handle the restore without coaching. A very good product that needs more comprehensive, better written documentation and more Ghost techs to support the customer base. It is a little more expensive, but I recommend the CD version over the download version. Everything is there and the CD functions as a boot drive so you do not have to create one from the website.

Having experienced two Boot Drive failures in the past 8 months, I purchased Norton Ghost as protection to spare myself the pain of a third failure.In the past I was familiar with Norton Ghost versions 6 - 9. As a senior software design engineer, we used Ghost at work to quickly wipe a PC and install different versions of Windows for the purposes of testing software. With the past success and reliability of this product I had no reservation choosing Ghost v15.0 for my own use at home. This was a big mistake.Older versions of Ghost were unique in their ability to capture a snap-shot of a hard-drive, and be able to re-install that image on a different hard drive. The new version of Ghost tries to go beyond that as a total Image/File backup solution. That's where they totally blew it. The user interface has dozens of cryptically labeled options that are inadequately explained in the help file. But worse yet, you may be using Ghost to make an image backup that may not properly restore the image; and you aren't informed of that until you experience a hard drive failure and run Ghost to restore your hard drive image.Here is my personal experience with Ghost v15.0: After my first failure back in December, I had to re-install Windows 7 because somehow it had become corrupted. It took me three months to restore my PC to the state it was in before the failure, but fortunately all my data was still on the hard drive.After that I started using a free backup program from SourceForge called Areca backup. This is a files only backup program, but it saved my bacon when my PC's Seagate 760 GB HD died back in June. This finally forced me to consider, what had only previously been a mild concern of mine, a serious backup strategy. So I went to Amazon and purchased a Sans Digital MobilSTOR MS2T+ 2 Bay SATA to eSATA external drive enclosure, and two Hitachi Deskstar 3.5-Inch 2 TB 7200RPM SATA III 6 Gbps 64 MB Cache hard drives. The external drives will be used to backup my three internal 1 TB drives. Oh, I also ordered Norton Ghost v15 the same time.Setting up Ghost to make an Image backup seemed to be straightforward. I used most of the default settings and the backup seemed to run successfully without incident. However, no matter what I tried, Ghost would not properly create a file backup. It would let me create a backup configuration, but when I tried to run it, it would run for about 10 minutes then stop; displaying a cryptic error code. Even attempting to backup a single directory with a single text file in it, failed. A visit to the Ghost web site showed that I wasn't alone experiencing this problem. And nowhere was a solution being offered by Symantec. Basically I was on my own to figure out the problem.The file backup problem was annoying enough, but what happened next is what killed my opinion of Ghost forever. As I said, I had been making Ghost image backups of my PC, when I made a terrible error in modifying the permission settings of an important subdirectory hierarchy. Yes, it was my fault. I wasn't paying close attention to the warnings Windows was yelling in my face, and I did it anyway. But I thought "No problem. Ghost will have saved my bacon." I had made an image backup just the day before my "mistake". So I pulled out my Ghost CD, booted up, and told it to restore the image I had saved on one of my external SATA drives. Ghost churned for awhile then put up an error message that said something to the effect "YOUR PC WAS UNDER HEAVY LOADING WHEN THE BACKUP WAS MADE. THE IMAGE MAY NOT BE RECOVERABLE". !!!!!!! What the @#$&%$! It tells me this AFTER it made the backup and I'm trying to use it, not WHEN I made the backup! So, after I returned from my rage induced short walk, I went ahead and let it restore the questionable image.Ghost finished it's thing, and I rebooted my PC. Nothing. I get a DOS message saying I have an un-bootable C: drive. Fortunately, after going through this back in December, I decided to try using my Windows 7 Pro install CD to repair my PC. From the menu I chose to repair an existing Windows installation. Windows churned for a bit, and said it had fixed the boot sector. A second boot attempt failed, so I repeated the process. This time it said it had repaired Windows. A third reboot, and I was back to my old (pre screw-up) image of my PC. Bottom line is this. Ghost did create an image of my PC. But unlike old versions it didn't restore it to a totally bootable condition.Regarding Ghost saying my PC was under heavy loading during the time it created the backup, that's pure BS. Ghost was the only program running at the time. My PC has an Intel Core duo I7 2.67 GHz processor, with 6 GB DDR3 RAM. Ghost barely registered on my System Resources graph, and then only in one of the processor's 8 cores.I have since removed Ghost from my PC. I'm using Windows 7 built-in Image backup capability for that purpose. For file backups I've returned to using Areaca Backup. My backup strategy is this: Weekly backups of my D: & E: drives. They contain data that doesn't change much. Weekly file and Image backup using Windows internal Backup. And Nightly backup of my C: drive files that I work with daily. Hopefully my PC crash nightmares are over.One more thing. I gave Ghost 1 Star, only because Amazon doesn't have a way of assigning negative Stars.