Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

Norton Ghost 14.0 was very easy to install and perform a image backup with. I picked Norton Ghost because of years of flawless performance from the product. Many backup programs make back up files, but recovery is some times a mistery. Not with Norton Ghost.

Unfortunately not able to use it, as it had expired. I purchased this in the US, while on holiday there, but it was more than a month before I was able to use it in my computer in Australia. Never the less, Amazon gave me a complete refund, including postage for sending it back to them. Amazon is a great retailer, no wonder they are very successful. Thank you for the great service.

I bought this in order to clone my old disk drive when I replaced it with a larger one. Unfortunately Ghost assigned a different drive letter to the new disk, making it impossible to simply swap the disk drives as all the software was looking for drive C, rather than drive G as Ghost had named the new drive. Norton Ghosts Indian Tech Support was available by internet chat only unless I wanted to pay $1 per minute for telephone support... The Indian support rep had NO idea what to do, and did not seem to understand the term clone, and after consulting his/her computerized telephone script screens finally told me to contact Microsoft for further support. I returned Ghost as defective to the vendor and got a full refund on this useless, unsupported software. While researching Ghost problems on the net, I discovered that you can download a free copy of Acronis from Seagate, the manufacturer of my new drive. It could not have been easier to install and run the software. It cloned my old drive onto the the new drive, and I was able to instantly swap the drives with no interruptions in functionality. Note that Seagates free version of Acronis will search for at least one Seagate drive on your system in order to run. If it does not find a Seagate, youll be prompted to buy the license, but in my case, it had no trouble detecting the new drive connected to a USB port. Im very grateful to Seagate for including such a great tool at no additional charge with their drives!

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.

Ive been using backup software for 25 years, and I must say that Ive never had a more disturbing experience than Ive just had in with Norton Ghost 14. My boot disk developed some bad sectors which NTFS didnt seem to be mapping out, so I backed up all the data on it and used a low-level format utility to reformat the drive and map out the bad blocks. So far so good. At first, Norton Ghost running from the recovery CD seemed to do a great job of restoring the system partition: it recognized the unpartitioned disk, prompted me to initialize it, and automatically located the backups. But heres the thing: it restored the image TO THE WRONG HARD DISK, erasing the disks previous contents. Sounds like pilot error, doesnt it? Believe me, I triple checked the restore destination, verifying it by hard disk model number (unique on my system), by the size of the raw disk, and by manually double checking the system disk and partition table from within Norton Ghost before the restore. Everything checked out fine, but somewhere along the line Ghost decided to pick a random other disk and erase it. This is absolutely unacceptable behavior for a backup product.

Did not live up to hipe. Too difficult to use and too slow to do the job. Look elsewhere, for a good backup and clone program.

After installing Ghost 14.0 and making a backup, the program took over the computer. I could not run any other programs. I had to rebuild Windows.

OK, as an Amazon Vine member I requested, and got this, free. Turns out that was a bad idea. I have used Norton Antivirus, etc., software for years and it seems to work pretty well, although it probably slows up my computers operation a little. So I thought, hey, a strong, function-rich backup program! And all I have to do is install and review it. How sweet is that? But when I mentioned that I had scored Norton Ghost 14 to two people far more knowledgeable about computers and software than I, both IMMEDIATELY and VISIBLY shuddered, and recommended that I not even try installing it. One of these people, an IT professional who makes his living going from site to site fixing the foulups of other IT pros, told me it was buggy, poorly documented, and did nothing much that light-to-moderate users would need anyway. He pointed out that Windows XP has built-in basic backup capabilities. My son -- who runs his own Website, plus blogging and gaming online constantly and maintaining a home network with four monitors, multiple hard drives and god knows what else -- told me he never runs anything Norton anymore because it has become bloatware that slows him down. So I didnt install Ghost 14.0. (Beat me, Amazon Vine! Scourge me if you must! I have failed you, although I may have saved my computers.) I did read the manual. Folks, here is a clue: it takes Norton 9 pages of 6-point type to tell the end user what he/she needs to run Ghost, and how to install it. Not a good sign for ordinary domestic users. Some of this is repetition, but most of it is somewhat technical information about what you need to install and run Ghost 14.0, and what may happen during installation. You do need to read this carefully. I did, and it succeeded mainly in convincing me that I wasnt going to even attempt an installation unless my daughter -- also an IT pro -- was on the phone with me. I may yet install this and then update my review. For now, however, a perusal of the many, many negative comments already posted here, plus my examination of the software manual, were enough to put me off.

All I can say is it plain didnt work. All I wanted to do was a simple system backup to a new hard drive and replace the old one with the new one. The system would not boot with thew new drive. Tried the same process with a free download of a different software and it worked with no problems at all. Norton/Symantec is allowing feature creep to destroy their products. Hey Norton!... users want products that are simple and effective.

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.