Customer Reviews

Norton Save & Restore [Old Version]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I purchased the product and installed it. Ran an image backup and it seemed fine. Next I tried backing ups certain Quicken Data files and folders and could not restore them.

Calls to Symantec technical support go half way around the world and they never get back with an answer. When I call daily to check on the status, they continue to say that they are "still working on it."

Buy at your own risk.

I purchased Norton Save and Restore because I am a digital photographer with no real "system" for backing up important files, documents and photographs. Things get backed up when I have the time to burn back up DVDs. Very infrequently!

I installed the product (following directions) on a Windows XP computer that is just barely a year old and I should state a computer I have never had a problem with. Within a few minutes of running my first backup, the computer froze with an error message about some kind of memory read issue. I then tried to reboot the system per the on screen instructions.

Guess what?
My hard drive had become unreadable. So instead of saving and restoring, I'm out a lot of money - way more than the cost of this product and I've lost photographs that can't be replaced along with tax information, important documents and so forth.
I tired to use the product to "restore" my system but since the initial back up did not complete, the restore disc just froze and my computer is not much more than a memory.

Symantec is not interested in my story. The drive is dead. That's my problem. Nice...

If you want safe back ups of your digital information, buy a second or third hard drive, run a raid system or use some kind of copy technique like I did with DVDs. Do NOT trust this product. Its a five star rip-off!

I've used many Norton/Symantec products in the past and been generally satisfied. I am pretty good with computers, but have not been able to get this program to work properly, and I'm left without options because Norton's technical support is almost nonexistent. The program seems to be full of bugs, so don't waste your money on this one.

The program crashed my external hard drive and made it impossible to run my older version of Norton Antivirus. Even better Tech support is non-existent unless you pay an extra fee. Do not buy this product!

...I downloaded the trial version of this and hated it...it's bloatware and hung on me (some of same errors I saw in other reviews) when I was testing it out. Save your money and buy something else. I am a loyal Norton user, but having just recently upgraded to WIN XP and thus looking at 2006 Norton products, I am shocked at the bloatware, phone home, buggy software they seem to have recently turned out. Based on reviews of their products and my test of this product.

This is what I want in back-up software (Norton, are you listening???). I want to create an image of my hard disk occasionally, and back it up to CD/DVD/USB Drive. And I want to be able to explore the image. And do the backup and all functions under Windows while I am working on something else. I don't want incremental backup bloatware. In other words, what I want is Ghost 2003 with extended features. WHY have you wrecked Ghost (of which this product is an incarnation)???

If you do want to buy, my advice is to download the trial version of this from Symantec and try that before purchasing. If it doesn't work to your liking, for backup software I would suggest Paragon Drive Backup 8.0 or R-Drive Image 3.0. I am very impressed by the Paragon software (the R-Drive Image software is good also, but the Paragon software is more advanced.) Paragon Drive Backup 8.0 is very solid/stable and I only had one issue, and that was with creating the CD Recovery Disk. I e-mailed support and they were very prompt in answering and they fixed my problem first time out. Paragon Drive Backup 8.0 can also read an external USB drive from the Recovery Software (I tested it). I felt compelled to look elsewhere for my backup needs as the reviews for Ghost 10 are depressing as well...but Paragon did a really good job with their software...

After installing Norton S&R, I backed up 182GB of data from a 300GB internal C: drive to a 300GB external drive. It went well. I checked the following day and found the auto backup went well, too. Confident that all was well, I ignored it for a few days. When I checked a few days later, I found out that S&R thought my destination drive was full after 3 backups. But, Windows reports it had over 100GB free.

That's not what ticks me off the most, though. What ticks me off the most is that S&R DIDN'T TELL ME that every daily backup failed for over a week. It lulled me into thinking I was backed-up when I wasn't. I think that borders on irresponsible!

I sent an e-mail to "Support" and got none. I don't think the support tech knows what a GB is. What a dunce!

I tried to uninstall and it wouldn't give up the space it claimed on my external drive. I had to reboot in safe mode to reformat the drive.

Not only shouldn't you buy this POS, it should be outlawed!

Reading all the extremely negative reviews about Norton's Save and Restore software makes me wonder who is really writing this stuff.
I am not a fan of Symantec's software by any means, i think Norton Antivirus is one of the most bloated and useless products in the software market, but i have to differ with most of the negative reviews about Save and Restore.
For the price i paid for this software (about $10 used) here in Amazon, i was able to backup the entire C drives of my workstation and my PVR computers and save them to an offline hardrive in case of an hardisk failure. The amount of time alone i spent installing the OS and applications on both computers makes the $10 worth many times over.
Also, you can create backups of files and folders in a constant schedule, so if you have two computers connected together on a network you can have them back each other. In case of an emergency, you just boot from the Save and restore CD and either connect through the network or connect the hardrive where your backups are to the computer you are trying to restore, and a few minutes later your computer will be up and running.
The only annoying thing i found, is that Save And Restore installs an application that sits on your taskbar tray and tells you are "unprotected" if you don't have Norton's Antivirus installed. You can get rid of this by running msconfig on Windows XP, and disabling "ccApp" from the computer's startup tab on msconfig.

2007-03-15 UPDATE: I have encountered some serious problems with Norton Save and Restore version 11. First when i tried to do a copy hard drive from one bootable Windows 2003 XP partition to a new hardrive, the imaged hardisk would boot the computer, but it would log you off as soon as you logged into Windows XP. I tried getting rid of this problem using various possible fixes i found on the net, such as booting from a special CD to edit the hardrive's registry, but nothing fixed the problem.
I even tried two different target hardrives but the results were the same, so I ended up creating a bootable CD with Norton Ghost 2003, copied the bootable partition using Ghost 2003, and it worked just fine.
I also tried to restore the partition from a recent Save and Restore hardrive backup, but when i booted from the Norton Save and Restore CD, the program would not mount the hardrive with the backup files, no matter what.
As it is usual with every Symantec piece of software makes, Norton Save and Restore is FLAKY, so buy at your own risk. I would definitely not pay more than $10 for this product.

The answer is that it's not a bad product. It's a good product that does what it's supposed to do. After reading the other reviews here I was very hesistant to buy S&R, but it was exactly what I was looking for and I have been very happy with all of Norton's other products. My thinking was "Norton has probably sold millions of these, and chances are all the folks who are happy with the product aren't going to take the time to come here and write a review. Only the people who have had problems, which may have had something to do with their computer and little to do with S&R." So I took a chance, bought the product, and it installed and works flawlessly.

I bought Norton Save and Restore to mainly back-up stuff on my older computer. I tried to install it, and it gave me a warning popup that I was missing a driver in order for the product to work properly. (WAN Miniport (ATW).) I contacted Symantec.

Message one: I understand from your message that you wish to know how to obtain drivers for missing drives. In order to add drivers for the drives, I suggest you to copy the drivers for the storage controller to a floppy disk. As the recovery environment starts, press F6, when you are prompted, to manually load the drivers from the floppy disk. Many driver packages contain a utility that creates a floppy disk for this purpose. If your drive package does not, contact the manufacturer of your hardware for instructions.
To add the drivers so Ghost can then see the drive look at this article:

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Also, you can obtain a custom Symantec Recovery disk by performing the steps given below:

1. Generate a system information file.
2. Assemble a driver package for your storage controller
3. Send the information to Symantec.
4. Then, Symantec will create an .iso file and send you a password so that you can download the file from our FTP site.

For further detailed instructions I recommend that you please refer to the following document from our Online Knowledge Base, which will provide you with the necessary information on the subject. Please click on the link below, which takes you to the document:

Please be informed that if you don't have the drivers, those drives will not be detected in the Symantec Recovery Disk.

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Message Two: I understand from your message that you wish to know is it possible to use Norton Save and Restore without installing the missing drivers.
Please allow me to apologize for the difficulties you have recently encountered.
Please be informed that you can create a backup using Norton Save and Restore without adding the drivers. But if you are facing a system crash and in case you need to restore your backup, you should have the missing drivers.
Symantec Recovery Disk will not recognize the drives which does not have drivers included in Symantec Recovery Disk.
To know more about Symantec Recovery Disk driver validation, I request you to refer the below document:

I decided to uninstall the product, and I obtained a refund. I would not recommend this product based on my experience with it, and Symantec Tech Support left me cold. I'm not very pleased with Norton lately.

I fell for it! I let Symantec take over my PC. I registered the product. I set a back up schedule that was perfect, every two days at 6 am. It ran each day.

For a month this went on and then one morning while logging in my hard drive crashed, unrecoverable. No problem, I have a detailed back up as of 6 am that DAY!

Was I wrong! After installing a new drive re imaging and attempting to restore my data, nothing, the software would not recognize its own files. I then attempted to get help from Symantec. Chat only of course. No good they had no idea what went wrong, all data was lost luckily I was able to find an old back up a few months old.

This was a tragedy. I trusted in this product and it failed me.