Norton Ghost 14.0

I wrote a review of this earlier but it was mysteriously deleted so I'll try one more time.

The 'files and folder' backup was designed by a moron. I had been using this for some time and didn't realize how useless this was until I tried to restore my files. The best way to explain this is by example. I tried to backup my 'documents and settings' folder. When you backup your files this way, ghost appears to create a bunch (lots) of files out of the data with meaningless filenames. When you restore, you have to search for a file or files by name. You can't specify a folder and if you search 'for all' it only displays an arbritrary number of files so you can't even select all files to restore. If you have a large number of files, you're out of luck. The list of files it displays includes a list of the folder names but you can't restore a folder; all you can do is open the folder and select files. When you restore a file, you have 3 options: 1) restore to the original (it claims that if the file already exists, the file is saved with an appended number, but I wasn't brave enough to try this), 2) restore to a new folder, 3) restore to a 'recovered' folder created by ghost. With options 2 and 3 when you restore the file, the pathname is not is not preserved even though ghost knows the pathname. There is no option to override this, so all your files get written to one folder. This is insanely stupid.

I've used ghost for many years and I thought when symantec came out with
symantec ghost is was an upgrade from the previous versions. This was
incorrect. There are actually two editions of ghost. This version is
based on 'driveimage', while the norton ghost solution product is based
on the old original ghost. Unfortunately, symantec does not allow you
to have both editions on your machine

Purchased Norton Ghost to provide a full system backup in the event of a hard drive crash. The installation went smoothly, things worked as advertised, backups have been accomplished but won't know the true picture unless I have a hard disk crash. I am not using this nor did I intend to use it for incremental data backups.

This did not do a workable copy of Windows Vista hard drive to another drive evan after four tries.

I own a Dell Dimension Computer with XP and a lot of installed software and I wanted to move my whole bootable C drive to a new larger drive. The software that came with my new Western Digital drive did not work. (Didn't expect it to really.) So I thought I'd just go top of the line and buy this. Big Mistake. I tried Norton Ghost 14 three different times and it simply would not make a bootable copy of my original. (Each attempt takes several hours on a big drive.) The software is buggy and will not do what it is supposed to do. If you want to clone your drive, download Acronis True Image. Acronis worked perfectly the first time. Not only that but the download gives you a 15 day free trial. (If you can't clone your drive in 15 days, you've got a big problem.)

Norton Ghost 14 is a big expensive piece of S@*& !!!!
Acronis True Image, two thumbs up !!!!

This product has a lot of potential, but when I disconnected my drive one afternoon and Ghost started it's daily backup, it spiked my processor and locked up the system. Major bug! I showed the tech support person and he said you must have the drive connected to backup. Of course, but what if the drive isn't connected - crash! Because of this one problem, I decided to try a different backup software.