Customer Reviews

Norton Ghost 12.0 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

I am using Norton Ghost on my Windows Vista machine with an external Seagate Hard Drive. Ghost is very easy to setup, and it walks you through doing a backup, so even the newbie pc users can backup their files easily. My initial concern was being able to search through the backups for a specific file but they have made that very simple and really fast in my opinion. As a seasoned IT guy, I didn't know if Ghost was really for me since I used to think of it more in terms with "imaging". However, Ghost 12 is the best solution I found for day to day backup of my home and business computers. You can setup automated backups so that every week, day, Monday, etc... the system will automatically do a backup without user intervention. I have tested the restore methods, and not only are they reliable, but they are fast too. In case you try to restore a file that already exists, you will be prompted by Windows to confirm the restore, which should help prevent overwriting a good file by accident. I hope every computer user will seriously consider getting an external storage device and using a backup utility like Ghost to safeguard their entire system or at least their important files.

Being a long time Ghost user, I bought a copy of Ghost v12. Install was easy, but during the first use it caused the computer (XP with all patches/service packs) to freeze. AND it results in a machine that would NOT boot to the desktop, apparently messing up the registry to the point that after entering the password it brought me to a plain blue screen with NO icons or anyway to do anything. A registry restore fixed this, and being a glutton for punishment, I rebooted several times to be sure everything was working well, then re-installed Ghost, only to have the same problem occur.

Bottom line, if it works for you, great. But be aware that it can cripple your computer. I returned it to Symantec for a refund and got a trial of Acronis TrueImage v10, and Acronis installed and worked without any issues

John

I used to like Ghost because it clones well when upgrading hard drives. I bought the version 12 and expected it to work well, but it failed to clone my hard drives in 3 computers. It always stoped at 99% and failed. Do not purchase this software unless you test this function. I had to use Acronis' True image to get the job done without any problem.

I spent many many hours trying to copy my laptop hard drive to a new larger hard drive. Backup worked fine, but getting the images to restore onto the new hard drive didn't work. I tried many different ways (only restoring the boot drive, using the disk copy feature instead of restoring from an image), but nothing worked. Over the course of days I did many backup and restore attempts, and disk copy attempts. In some cases the new drive was able to boot into Windows but partitions were corrupted. In other cases partitions seemed OK, but networking and other features in Windows didn't work. What a mess!

I finally gave up on Norton Ghost, downloaded and installed the free trial version of Acronis True Image Home 10.0 ([...]) and it worked perfectly the first time. I even did complicated operations like resizing the partitions on the target drive and it completed flawlessly. Acronis has many more options than Ghost and it allows you to do more complicated restore/copy than Ghost, which has limited functionality, and even that doesn't work.

I returned Norton Ghost and purchased a copy of Acronis True Image.

I've used Norton software for many years now (prior to the Symantec acquisition) and it's always been good quality, no frills, does what it's supposed to software but I've had nothing but trouble with recent versions - especially Ghost 12.

I'm an experienced user so it's extra frustrating when things don't work as designed / expected. I have yet to achieve a successful back-up using Ghost 12. I receive a variety of error messages (when the software will actually allow me to initiate a back-up at all!). Contacting technical support is a challenge - they take you through all the usual steps - uninstall, re-install, disable this, disable that ... all of which I had already tried and none of which work (hence contacting tech support). What's really concerning is that when searching the Symantec support site for a 'specific error message' their software outputs yields ZERO results in their support database (how can this be?).

Back-up's are there to save your data should you have some kind of failure - how can you possibly trust this software will indeed recover your data when there are so many issues getting it to create a backup in the first place? I'm sorry I ever bought this software and even sorrier I've spent so much time trying to get it to work (without error messages).

Do yourself a big favor and shop for an alternate back-up product - I can't recommend one yet as I'm about to try others myself :-)

My first full backup and several incremental backups to my external drive went more or less okay. Thereafter, I experienced one problem after another. For instance, the program can't find recovery sets that plainly exist, as indicated by the ability of the program to browse them. And, it has a tendency to hang the system just before the multi-hour backup is complete. Moreover, I found Symantec's on-line customer support incredibly inadequate.

In my work I'm a long-time user of Symantec's enterprise version of Ghost. Thanks to my experience with Ghost 12, I plan to reconsider our choice of enterprise back-up product. Backups are too important to trust to a product that is unreliable and a company that fails to forthrightly acknowledge the problem.

Complicated to set up. Not especially user friendly, and no explicit directions. Not nearly as simple as version 9. After initial installation it seemed to work, but then after a day or so, it interfered with a number of other applications and seems to have totally corrupted the registry. Fortunately I had a workable restore point. Took me hours to uninstall it. Unfortunately I have had this problem with virtually all Norton products to the point that I won't touch any of them in the future. The programs seem to want to take over my computer and really mess things up. I now use Acronis 10 which is easy to set up, has excellent directions and is user friendly.

Note that I gave the product 3 stars -- that was in error. I should have given it 1 star.

A corrupt file of Norton's corrupted my system including the keyboard driver. Their tech support in India blamed me saying I had installed Ghost incorrectly. What I could possibly have done that would have resulted in corrupt files, he didn't say. He was supposed to upgrade my problem & someone would call me back, but no one ever did.

I tried reinstalling my keyboard driver, but couldn't get rid of Ghost before it had again corrupted my system. Had to reinstall XP. Luckily I had my backup that had been created the day before. It took two days, but I'm back in business and will never again purchase a Norton/Symantec product.

P.S. There seems to be no way to give a product zero stars.

I use this software on my Windows XP Pro machine with 800GB of internal drive space where I keep all my digital photos. This is data that is priceless and cannot be recovered if lost. My back up strategy is very important to me.

I purchased Ghost 12 a few months ago after using 2 other back up packages that weren't working very well. One didn't restore the files I lost and the other took over 12 hours to run and had a horrible space managment thing going on.

I set Ghost to do a system recovery point on all 3 of my internal drives once a week and set it to do incremental file back ups every night. It takes 10 - 30 minutes on average each night (automated; I have it set to run at 2AM) to go through specific data directories I selected and back up only the files that have changed. This is exactly what I was looking for. The profiles were easy to setup for both the weekly and nightly backups and the restore feature is easy to use, has a great search feature and, most importantly, actually restored the files.

I recently had a system corruption on my C: drive that made it so I could not run ANY executables, including Ghost. I popped in the Ghost CD, which is bootable, booted up with it into the ghost program and ran the a system restore from my last recovery point. Unfortunately I had been out of town a few days and my last recovery point had been taken that morning and the corruption back up with it. So, I did it again and restored the recovery point taken 1 week prior to the last one. Thankfully there was a prior one ...

It gave me the option of only restoring the corrupted C: drive and left my 2 data drives alone. It took less then an hour, worked perfectly, put the system back in order. I then booted in normally, loaded the ghost console, searched my file back ups for any files that had changed on that specific drive since my recovery point was taken and promptly restored them all within 10 minutes. This also worked perfectly and my machine was back like nothing had happened.

It also has a nifty feature which it monitors the space on the external drive I back up to and only keeps the number of recovery points I have room for. Of course you don't have to use this feature, you can specify the number you want it to keep, but I like it to monitor it for me.

Overall I am extremely pleased with this software and feel it was worth every penny I paid for it.

After purchasing Ghost 12.0 (read info on website and on box)that this software WILL burn onto DVD's, I find that it won't. As least with my version of Vista (Sony laptop w/Vista Premium). "No," this is NOT "sour grapes" but an honest and real review.

In the software's wizard for making an image backup, there's a pop-up that says: "it is not advisable to make a DVD backup. Funny, the website & box says it will burn an image backup.

The above reminds me of those side mirrors on cars that say, on the bottom of the mirror: "objects in this mirror may seem larger than they really are." Seems to me that they could have made mirrors that were flat instead of a curved mirror. It must have been a large batch of rejected mirrors. Instead of trashing them, they added the wording on the bottom and installed them on cars!

I've had many live chats, which Norton offers. The tech (yes, from our favorite country) from either India, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia is suppose to help, but in my case, one of my many chats (this one he entered my computer, with my permission, to manipulate the software to make it work correctly) he made it worse to the point I had to un-install and reinstall.

At that point, I again, tried to make a burned/DVD image backup. This time it gave me new error numbers. Again, I made a live chat with a tech and again, this guy new less than me! I kid you not. They were no help at all.

Think about the times you've made contact with a software website for help or a phonecall and you receive an e-mail from them asking you to submit a review/questionaire of the help you received, so they can improve their assistance. Well, Norton knows better and doesn't send an e-mail asking for your opinion of their techs. Gee, I wonder why?!?!!!

Yes, you can see by other reviewers, they can get this software to burn, but it's a crapshoot and you might just be "burned" instead.

I do have to say, this software works when you make an image to another hard drive.

An ADDED BONUS......if you want to make use of what Ghost 12.0 does and NOT PAY ANYTHING, "YES," nothing......I recommend going to www.seagate.com and click the support and download a FREE, yes, FREE program that does what Ghost does, but BETTER. In the "downloads" click DiscWizard. It's Vista compatable. it burns to DVD's, hard drives, formats drives, clones drives and much much more and it's FREE. It's made by Acronis, the makers of Diskeeper.

I hope, once you get DiscWizard, you'll come back here and post your comments on Seagate's DiscWizard to others won't go through what I and others have gone through.

Again, you can't go wrong with FREE software, especially when it works!