Symantec NORTON GHOST 10.0

Reviewed by: Helmutp900

Duration of ownership: 11 Months

Strengths: None

Weaknesses: Re-activation does not work

Overall: $ 74.54 I paid @ BestBuy on Jan. 3/06 and can not use the product. I have sent the scanned sleve and disk as well as my AMEX statement/invoice and now I do not get a reply anymore.

Reviewed by: Rodger

Duration of ownership: 4 Months

Strengths: None that I can find.

Weaknesses: Different and incompatible with V9. poor support.

Overall: I have been successfully using V9 for almost 2 years, but it no longer works with USB drives on my Dell laptop. Neither Dell or Symantic will help. Went to V10 to resolve problems, but find it useless. I used V9 to backup drives to DVDs and to restore drives or files as needed. It has developed a problem with the support of USB drives on my Dell as I have several drives from multiple vendors which I move back and forth to other systems. There are no problems with the USB drives from other applications and backup programs. V10 does not support the backup of a single drive or partition as V9 did, and it does not appear to support DVD drives except in a RW mode. I will have to go back to V9 on a desktop PC that has a writeable DVD drive and wait until I rebuild the Dell before using it. To call this latest version of Norton's Backup by the name Ghost seems fraudulant to me as it doesn't support the main features of all previous Ghost programs.

Reviewed by: neolove333

Strengths: none

Weaknesses: all

Overall: I have used Ghost for years and had been using Ghost as part of Norton Systemworks 2003. After I installed the program, the rest of Systemworks did not work including my paid antiviral program. It caused multiple computer problems. Symantec tech support was of zero help. I ended up uninstalling this program, Systemworks, and then installed Ghost 2003 (which came with the program). Despite having used Symantec products for many years, I will never use their products again. I am looking for a replacement for Ghost 2003 as it does not work in my laptop. If Symantec continues with this trend, I would not be surprised to see them out of business.

Reviewed by: fish4dreams

Strengths: None other than Windows-based interface.

Weaknesses: Norton Ghost 10.0 (Full Product) would not perform a complete image backup of hard drive.

Overall: Norton Ghost 10.0 (Full Product) does backup files and emails, but failed to make a complete image backup of hard drive after numerous attempts. I had an 80GB hard drive in my notebook and wanted to upgrade to a 160GB drive. Uninstalled Norton Ghost 10.0 and ended up using Seagate's DiscWizard for Windows and performed perfect image within 30 minutes.

Reviewed by: dyeager

Strengths: easy install and configuration. real easy to use

Weaknesses: always assumes my memory sticks should be used for backup. prompts to execute a backup everytime I plug one in

Overall: Easy to use, fast and reliable. This is exactly what you would expect from this product. The tool has already proven invaluable when I had a crash and needed to restore.

Reviewed by: iangreen

Strengths: Comes highly rated by PC Magazine (an Editor's Choice)

Weaknesses: Was unable to back up any of my disk drives. Seems to have a problem with RAID drives.

Overall: I purchased Norton Ghost with high expectations of a simple mechanism to backup my hard drive - both in the case of a complete failure and in the case of lost files. After installation, it refused to back up my primary disk (a RAID drive). After searching product documentation, support web sites and forums, I got it to the point it would at least start a back up before failing. But that was it. It also was unable to back up a simple (non-RAID) drive. After playing with it for a month I gave up and listed it for sail on eBay.

Reviewed by: MrGeode

Strengths: Image and Incremental backups, browse backup.

Weaknesses: CD/DVD Verify operation and problem recognizing Promise Raid 0 (stripping) configuration in standalone mode.

Overall: I have been a user of Ghost since 1999. Version 9 was a major improvement after Symantec bought Powerquest in 2003 including for the first time on-line image and incrementals. Ghost 10 improves on performance especially to USB drives. My first grip with both v9.0 & v10.0 is that the software waits until the last CD/DVD is created before starting the verify pass. Ghost makes you swap the first and last disk a few times and load all the other disks in sequence. It should be able to verify each disk as it is created. Because it is time consuming, I only image to DVD once a quarter. I mainly use image & incrementals to an on-line disk and limit the file size to what will fit on a DVD. V10.0 added the ability to do more than one incremental in a day. Its a good feature if you make a lot of changes daily on your system. Restore works flawlessly from either an incremental or image to drives it sees including USB and firewire external drives. The only issue with the standalone mode is that I have not been able to get either version to recognize a stripped (raid 0) disk on my Promise controller even when I have loaded the Promise XP driver. I have not had any problems with mirror (raid 1), raid 5 or JBOD disks. My system disk is a raid 1 disk set. Another nice feature I like is the ability to look in the backups and restore individual files. It is great if you need go back to an earlier version of a file or recover a file deleted or corrupted.