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(More customer reviews)Symantec Ghost 14 seems to be a merge of features between Symantec's older Ghost product line with Symantec's disastrous "save and restore" product, which for some strange reason is still offered in version 2.0.
You can see my reviews for Save and restore here on amazon to see why my copy ended up in the garbage can.
I have been using ghost in its various incarnations for several years, when it used to run off a floppy drive, so i am very familiar with its capabilities. Symantec Ghost 14 can backup files or your entire computer's drives if so desired to another computer on a network or to a USB drive. It can do this on a schedule.
The features of Ghost 14 on paper are impressive, so i decided to give it a test by installing the product on my laptop and creating a complete backup to a network drive on another computer. The entire backup was completed in less than 15 minutes. Then i decided to create an updated recovery disc for my laptop to do a full recovery, Ghost automatically recognized the fact that my original Recovery Disk had been burned to a rewriteable disc, and proceeded to erase and burn a new updated version on the same disc.. very impressive.
Unfortunately, as soon as rebooted my laptop with the Recovery Disc and i put an ip address on the interface (i am not running DHCP on my network) i wasn't able to connect to the computer containing the backup, due to some kind of authentication error.. so no matter what i did, i wasn't able to get past this hurdle.. so i am left with a complete computer backup i am not able to access..
Imagine, how would you feel if you computer died and you weren't be able to restore, thanks to Symantec buggy software, despite having an entire backup of it???
What is the point of all the countless fancy features if this product fails at its most useful feature.. which is to restore your computer's hardrive in case of failure?
For all intents and purposes, Norton Ghost 14 is another piece of semi-functional software.. with partially working features, pretty much like every product Symantec makes...
I don't recommend purchasing this product, unless you are somewhat computer literate and are able to get through the bugs that are present in this product.
UPDATE 1: When i booted my laptop using the recovery disc, every time i tried to map the recovery point share on a computer on the network, i keep on getting the following error message: A specified logon session does not exist.
After doing some online research, i was able to figure out how to fix this error by entering the name of the computer followed by the login name in the following format compname\username when prompted for a user / password to map the drive. I will post another update to see if recovery works as advertised.
UPDATE 2: When i booted my laptop using the updated recovery CD, and i mounted the recovery point using the compname\username trick to authenticate, i was able to dump the entire laptop's drive image and do a full recovery. The catch is that i work on the field, and I was able to find out the solution on my own, but less savvy users will probably have to resort to having to call Symantec, etc etc, so when you purchase this product expect to spend some time making it work and make sure you TEST the recovery process if you can.. because the last thing you want to find out is that your recovery process doesn't work when you really need it.
UPDATE 3: I tried to create a backup of my Windows 2000 Dell laptop.. but Norton Ghost 14 doesn't support Windows 2000.. so beware.
UPDATE 4: Unlike Norton's disastrous Save and Restore, Ghost doesn't go on the internet and check the serial number every time you install it on a computer, I know this after i installed my copy of Save and Restore one too many times to one of my 4 computers and the serial number became "blacklisted" and the product ended up in the garbage can.
This good news means that if you want want to make backups of multiple computers, you can just purchase ONE copy of Norton Ghost.
UPDATE 5: Feb 2009
I just tried to move a hardrive with a bootable partition (Windows XP) and a data partition to a bigger SATA Drive with Norton Ghost 14.
After installing the new hardrive on the computer and partitioning using Windows XP, i used Ghost to copy the bootable partition and the data partition to the new drive's partitions.
The results were as follows:
1-The bootable partition copied ok, and the new drive boots from the partition, the only problem is that when i try to login into Windows XP, the system logs me off inmmediately. This is the same problem i had with Norton Save and Restore.
2-I spent over an hour copying the data partition using Ghost 14.. but at the end, the program gave me an error message telling me that the copy couldn't be copied because the system had ran out of memory.
The data that i tried to copy was around 300Gb.
After the Ghost error, all the data the program had supposedly copied was inaccessible because the partition couldn't be mounted by Win XP, so i had to reformat the new partition using the disk utilities in Win XP and use Microsoft's FREE copy utility ROBOCOPY to copy all the files from one partition to another.
The copy worked fine.
Norton Ghost couldn't do something a FREE utility can.
I ended up connecting a CD drive to the computer to boot from a Ghost 2003 CD, and used that program to copy the C partition to the new drive and was finally able to migrate to the new hardrive.
UPDATE 6: 2009-11-14
I was forced to use Norton Ghost 14 to update my computer's laptop hardrive since Ghost 2003 cannot backup an active drive to a firewire connected external drive.
So this is what i did:
1-I booted my laptop with the Norton Ghost 14 CD created specifically for my laptop when i installed the software on it.
2-i backed up my entire laptop hardrive to an external 1tb firewire drive.(bear in mind trying to backup the drive while Windows was running failed every time, so i had to boot from the Norton CD and back it up the old fashioned way.. just like in Ghost 2003!)
3-Physically replaced the laptop's old drive with the new one.
4-I booted my laptop with the Norton Ghost 14 CD. The software was able to find the recovery point in the firewire drive and i was able to do a recovery to the new drive. At no point i was prompted to restore the MBR or to make the new drive bootable.
5-You will think all is well, right? but when i booted the laptop off the new drive, what do you think happened?
Nothing.. the drive refused to boot and i got a blank screen, because it didn't occur to the geniuses at Symantec that most new drives don't have bootable master records (MBR), so the data is in the new drive, but it won't boot.
So i had to get my Windows XP CD, do a dummy installation so the drive boots, and then dump the Norton Ghost Image on the drive AGAIN.
Only when i tried to restore the drive a second time i was prompted to restore the original drive image and the drive MBR.. What a joke!
Symantec is the Microsoft of security and disk utility software, their consumer and pro-level software is garbage, and since their horrible products can't compete in the marketplace, the only way they can get market share is to buy other competing products / companies such as Altiris, Partition Magic and many others!
This is the last time i brother with Symantec's garbage software.
After this, i am uninstalling all traces of Ghost from my laptop and i looking for some other software package.. there has to be something better out there than this piece of junk.
Needless to say, don't waste your time purchasing Norton Ghost 14, unless you want to spend endless hours trying to make it work.
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