Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

I used a prior version of ghost to clone a hard drive in the past and it worked. I bought the 14.0 version and the support site provides a guide (Document # 2008011103205462) for performing the disk to disk transfer. I wanted to clone my old 200gb IDE drive to a western digital 1 tb SATA drive. Ghost did not function as advertised. Ghost could not find the destination drive. Long story short, I downloaded Western Digitals version of TRUE IMAGE from WD website and it did a PERFECT job! Save your money by buying a WD drive and download the cloning software for free.

All the review said this was a easy to use product. After installation it failed to back my C: drive as promised in the literature. I had to GOOGLE for a solution. And finally after doing 7 CHECKDSK command it finally work.

I have an older pc with an outdated version of Windows XP. After contracting a virus that forced me to wipe my computer clean, I decided to get Norton Ghost because I dont want to have to call Microsoft every time I need to reinstall the operating system. Its the peace-of-mind in knowing that even after a catastrophe, I can restore my computer to a save point. I havent had to use it, yet, though, knock on wood.

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.

The only reason I gave Ghost 14 four stars is because during the backup screens you do not see all the partitions on your hard drive in the default configuration. A novice user would not know that other hidden partitions exist on their computer and would probably not backup them. If the purpose of Ghost 14 is to backup an entire computer then the user should see all partitions that exist on their hard disks as the default configuration. Let the user hide any partition as an option since I know hidden partitions are important too. If your hard disk fails you do want everything back including the hidden partitions. In my opinion the menu configurations of Ghost 14 are more complicated than what it needs to be for the average user. Gone are the days of Ghost 2003 when Symantec would allow a home user to backup all his computers at home with a single copy of Ghost. Now we must all purchase one license of Ghost per PC. The only Reason I purchased Ghost 14 was because DELL messed up their bios on my new laptop so Ghost 2003 would not work with their USB ports. Ghost 2003 would allow you to create your own boot CD disks if you knew how to create boot CD disks with Nero and knew how to modify batch files. You were able to boot Ghost from a CD and backup your entire computer to an external/internal drive or burn a CD or DVD backup. Ghost 2003 is still able to backup all my other computers with Windows Vista and Windows XP (32bit and 64bit versions). The Ghost 14 bootable CD only restores images and does not have any backup software available so it behaves like a rescue CD. All backups in Ghosts 14 are conveniently done when logged in to a Windows XP or Windows Vista account unlike Ghost 2003 which requires you to use a bootable CD, USB Drive, or floppy disks.

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 was easy to install after earlier version outdated. Best product ever. FAST, EASY,DEPENDABLE. Price was a great deal and value for the money.

I give it one star for price. I purchased a Western Digital external book drive to use as my backup device. Turns out I needed to reformat the book drive from FAT to NTFS to get the backup to run. But you dont get a message telling you that. Instead you get something about unable to connect to services??? So after uninstalling and reinstalling Ghost, which also requires an uninstall and reinstall of my Norton AV, I got smart and search the web for an answer. Found it, reformatted my drive, and the backup started working correctly. That only took 2 days of my time. Then theres the recovery disk. Kept getting an error about unable to erase the CD. Other programs had no problem with the CD. Was wiser this time and researched it on the web first this time. Found out some gibberish about reloading the driver for the program used by Norton to interact with the drive (I have a brand new Dell laptop). Did that a couple of times and finally got the program to create a custom recover disk for me. 1/2 a day there. Still havent tested it yet. Not a program for the faint of heart or the inexperienced PC user. I can usually muddle my way around but not with this program.

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.

Once upon a time, Ghost was a valued part of the sophisticated computer user or, more appropriately, network administrators toolkit. That was a long time ago before Symantec acquired the product and, in my opinion, pretty much ruined it. The newest version offers the user no features they cannot get in competitive packages, often implemented more effectively. Typical of Symantec products, Ghost 14 is a resource hog and prone to failure - not something you want in a package that supposedly protects you by backing up your files. The interface is poor. Documentation is fair. Performance is okay, but a number of people have complained about restore failures. That is, as you can imagine, one thing you do not want to hear about backup and restore software - that the restore function is problematic or doesnt work. Backup file format seems to be proprietary which is also bothersome. I dont want to be a slave to some publishers proprietary format. On the whole, I am wary of Ghost these days and prefer other products which are equally or better featured, less expensive, have better reputations and seem to be more reliable. Jerry