Customer Reviews

GoBack 3 Deluxe

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

GoBack is great! GoBack ain't-so-great! Pick one now, and you'll agree with the other choice later...

I teach Quality Assurance Testing software for a living. I've been using GoBack to revert my drives after classes so I don't have to uh, go back and reset all the program options and databases.

Three problems I've had with GoBack: 1) creating music CD's, 2) GoBack doesn't tell you how much free space you have remaining in its "History" before it starts overwriting older data.

Number three, you ask? A high potential for having to rebuild your entire operating system if you pick a "System Safe Point" and the GoBack fails.

If the point you attempt to revert to is more than six days old, you're probably in for a rude surprise. Pick a bad point, and you could doing a total rebuild of your system and all your software from scratch! Oh, and you'll find yourself wishing you'd made those back-ups you've been putting off.

GoBack keeps a history. It can store up to 2 Gigabytes of sector changes. The list continues to grow, making you THINK you can still revert to way-back-when.

GoBack lacks any form of "Guage" by which you can tell when you're close to running-out of room in the history space. The GoBack log still holds ALL of the human-readable history since the last time you cleared it.

So you pick a point to which you'd like to revert. GoBack reboots and then cranks, and cranks, and cranks. Looks good. Eighty-percent. Ninety percent. Then GoBack tells you something like: "Gosh, golly, gee! We know it was in your list, but Buddy... we've lost the data and can not continue. Wanna try a different useless "System Safe Point" and see if it works? We can't tell you if it will, but go ahead, YOU make a guess and we'll give it another shot! Are ya feeling lucky, Kid?"

Not to mention that when I try to record an audio CD while GoBack is running, the resultant CD reminds one of the old days of vinyl records. Lots of clicks-and-pops. Hope you have a spare hard drive you can swap-in (sans GoBack) so you can make CD's. If you turn GoBack off to burn CD's, you lose ALL your "history!"

Nice idea, this GoBack-stuff. Great start for a "Beta" product. Poor "Quality Control," lack of thought on important issues. And a false sense of security for the uninitiated user.

To it's credit: GoBack HAS allowed me to revert a file to what it looked like before I screwed it up (kind-of like Source Code Control without the expense). It's saved me time-and-again when a piece-of-crap software package I've installed has taken control of my system (e.g. ZoneAlarm Pro). It lets me see what files get changed when I do some specific task, or when I install a program.

GoBack does have value.

Buy it. Use it. DON'T trust it more than six days back.

Make back-ups of all your important data. Frequently. Or at the very least: just before you attempt to Go Back.

I am very particular about my computer. However (at my wife`s insistance), I`ve installed some childrens programs/games for nieces and nephews (ages 3-10) and have a 13 year old niece who likes to surf the internet and leave me little surprises. (changed wallpaper, screensavers, messages, etc.)

Needless to say this can sometimes leave me with a jumbled up mess to fix. I`m also a download junkie and always trying new apps and utilities. Although I do periodic back ups it`s nice to be able to pinpoint exactly where I want my system to be restored to. If an install goes bad or new app messes things up it`s a very simple matter to back things up, even if Windows won`t start.

I run a DELL XPS with W98/SE Pentium 550mhz/288 megs RAM and have seen no system slowdown whatsoever. Expect to hear some more hardrive activitiy in particular if you have software that updates via the internet on a daily basis and affects a large number of files.

Cons, not too many. I would like to see a bit more configurability. Such as not having to protect an extended DOS partition on the C: drive. You have the option of setting passwords on the administrative and user level that will keep prying fingers of 13 year old nieces from deleting your GOBACK history and such.

Overall, I highly recommend this protection for anyone who has information on their PC they don`t want to lose.

Go Back has a lot going for it, but when I installed it on my computer it would not boot up. During the boot up phase, and before Windows installed, I was directed to "press any key to continue". I have a USB keyboard and mouse. Because windows did not yet install, I could not "press any key to continue" since my USB ports were not active, and I was stuck. I had to connect a regular serial port keyboard before I could continue the boot up so I could uninstall the software. I tried to contact "tech support" for a possible solution, but was unable to connect. I sent an e-mail query without a response. The theory behind "Go Back" is a good one, but Roxio's tech support is non-existant.

RSB

AGH!

Roxio Go Back came with my copy of Norton SystemWorks disk, and the first thing I noticed after installing it was, booting up my PC (1.8 GHz Pentium 4, 512K DDR SDRAM, WinXP) suddenly took up to 3 times longer than before...other software suddenly took 2-3 times longer to boot up. Even my [moderately priced] high-speed cable internet connection slowed down, to how my old dial-up connection was on a good day. I began having problems shutting down, had to resort to just hitting the power off button sometimes. Then I began having problems starting up...once in a while my PC would lockme into in 8-bit display mode, so I had to restart in order to go back to my normal graphics display mode.

Finally, about 3 months later, my PC would start up ONLY in the 8 bit display mode. I lived with this for a few days hoping it would eventually go away, but finally decided to actually USE "Go Back" for a change. So I "went back" about 2 months to an alleged "safe point." Bad, bad idea---it stopped booting up at all and started giving me the XP "Blue Screen of Death." To its credit, I WAS able to get out of this hairy situation by "going back" to a "safe point" only 3 days back, finding myself right back in 8-bit graphics mode. But then again, I would never have NEEDED to "go back" if I hadn't installed this blight disguised as a software utility.

At which point I did a little Internet research, looking at the CNET users' comments on this product I realized that I wasn't the only victim by far. So I removed GoBack, and whaddaya know...PRESTO! All aforementioned problems evaporated and have never come back since. My system now boots up well under 15 seconds instead of 2 minutes, and everything just zings along beautifully.

Moral: somethings are just too good to be true. If you already have Roxio Go Back on your computer, remove it before it starts to screw your PC like it did mine. If you don't have GoBack, spend your money on a CD burner instead and just get in the habit of backing up your docs regularly, or if you want to be extra careful, use Norton Ghost to back up your whole system every couple of weeks.

Symantec isn't what it used to be, they are not the same once-great company who built a solid reputation with "Norton Utilities". Nowadays, their software is buggy, and they offer NO free, live tech support!

An example is GoBack. When Roxio had it, it was a great software. I used it on Windows 98 2nd edition and never had one problem with it, and it saved me a lot of hassles, a number of times.

But this version does not work with XP. I have a Dell computer, right out of the box; that is, no extra hard drive, no petitions, just a plain old computer with some software and utilities.

I loaded GoBack 3 Deluxe and then my computer would not start. It looped through the Windows Screen and the GoBack screen, never opening XP to my desktop.

I thought, "No problem! I'll call tech support!" Yeah, right! There IS NO TECH SUPPORT BY PHONE. Not unless you wish to pay them $30 per issue, to talk with you. You read that correctly: The software you just bought does not have any live phone OR chat tech support! The only option is to pay $30 for their help, or to write them an email

I wrote them an email.

They wrote me back the next day, but not with solutions. Rather with a whole bunch of questions that seem fairly irrelevant. Who makes my hard drive??!! What is my Bios version? They suggested I call my computer manufacturer, to get the answer to these 5-6 questions. I did so.

I wrote them back.

They said that I should go into my registry and do a lot of editing (editing which could TOTALLY eff up my computer if it isn't done 100% accurately; and who knows if they told me the right way to do it?)

So I am out $30, because I waited past the 30 days before installing it. (I procrastinated it, precisely because I had a feeling it would end up being a nightmare installing it! I was right.)

In conclusion: Do not buy GoBack for XP SerPack 1.

p.s. I still say that GoBack is no good for XP SP1. But at least Symantec did give me a refund on it when I complained. Too bad, when this product came out, and W98 was the main OS, it was a good product.

I used a previous version of GoBack on a Windows 98 machine, and it worked as promised, saving my kiester on a few occasions. So when I saw GoBack 3 claimed compatability with XP, I bought it, thinking it would give me better security.

Think again! It seemed to install OK, so I went online to register. Roxio's website said I should download their free update, which I dutifully did, and installed. Then, when I re-booted, the computer stalled on the first black screen with a disk read error message. After trying every trick I know, I realized that my only hope of saving my precious data was to put a new hard drive in the computer, install XP on it, and then try to recover my data. $... later, I found to my dismay that even though both of my old drives showed up in BIOS, Windows couldn't see either one! A very knowledgable computer tech at a local store rolled his eyes when I described the problem, and said that they don't even try to recover data from drives messed up by GoBack. His only suggestion was to try Partition Magic ($...) to recover the data. Long story short, it worked, but I had to harvest all the data, and re-format my old drives to remove the last vestages of GoBack, and then re-build my software environment from scratch.

This software has cost me over $... and many hours of my time.
DON'T USE IT WITH WINDOWS XP!

I'm honestly not a big fan of Roxio's software. For example Easy CD creator. I think it's overpriced and not nearly as good as Nero 5.5+. GoBack however, is a completely different story and should not be turned away from by brand name alone. At roughly just under $... (on-line download, at ....com), it's price and functionality is unmatched.

First off, you should know the system restore features of WinXP are actually licensed from Roxio. It's a highly scaled down version of GoBack. However, GoBack does far more than System Restore. You can literally rewind your hard drives days into the past, undo any damage done in seconds. Big error delete important files? Not any more. Install a new program from the very pit of black darkness that refuses to be gone from thou holy system? GoBack. Virus trouble? GoBack can even undo the damage.

Accidentally delete a needed file or worse, overwrite it? No sweat. Worse is when you change a file, then wish a few days later you had that old copy. GoBack can pull up a reversion history of any file sometimes going back weeks. Click of a button, you've got your old copy back, even several changes and re-saves later. That alone is worth $30.

Another great feature is called a GoBack Drive. Say you need a lot of old files, but you don't want to revert the whole drive or bring them back one by one. Well, GoBack can create a virtual drive that is actually your hard drive as it was a time in the past. You can literally view your entire drive as it was in the past, while still working with all your current files and not changing a thing.

GoBack works fine with multiple drives, I myself use it on two 80GB drives with no problems at all. It can revert them both together, separately, whatever you want. It will not fragment your drive like you might expect, and it won't cause lost packets or anything like that. At default, it takes about 10% of your drive to store the info, but that can be raised (to look further into the past) or lowered (to save space at the expensive of depth).

It won't even hog your processor and slow down your system any noticeable amount. GoBack works in the background, quietly chugging away while you go about your business. When the hard drive is idle and things are quiet, it kicks in and goes to work. If a file is so massive that it would cause the system to slow down, GoBack steps aside and waits until the right time. It's all very seamless.

The amount of trouble that GoBack has saved me is worth the $... many times over. I consider myself a seasoned pro with computers in nearly every way... But I don't care how professional you are, everyone has that moment where they install something, delete something, or do something that just causes a look of terror on their face at what they just did, and how long it's going to take them to fix it. Or worse, sometimes you have no idea at all what happened and you must fix it, fast. GoBack will do just that. In mere minutes, everything is as it was and smooth as ever. Tell me that's not worth it.

- Rirath_com

Computer ran great yesterday? You did something stupid and unistalled AOL because you couldn't get a steady connection & now you can't find one of those disks to re-install? No problem if you have got Roxio's Go Back 3.0 installed. Both of these events have happened to me recently. Rather than spend hours trying to track down the unusual slowness & ghostly hard drive activity on my system I just pointed Go Back to the prior days boot point & let it run while I went to work. When I came home my computer was booted into Windows, running well, & I had a Go Back screen that would allow me to optionally revert forward individual files (I did my Quicken files so that the work/transactions done on the 'slow' day weren't lost).

This program will save you hours of headaches...don't be a slave to your computer..when it acts up just GO BACK!

Programs like GoBack are very useful when they work correctly. Unlike the restore program that comes with WindowME, GoBack won't mysterious vanish one day making it useless. I had it on Windows 98 and am putting it on ME. The only problem I had with it was that I had to disable it whenever I wanted to play a dos based game, and disabling it causes it to lose all the data it has stored of changes to your system so you have to start over when turning it back on.

When I had Windows 98, it was great. When I upgraded with a new computer and Windows XP, I couldn't use my old stand-by (incompatible), so got the the version that was compatible with XP. After installation, I couldn't shutdown or restart the computer. When I un-installed the program, my computer worked just fine. I'll try it again later, after downloading more XP updates.