Norton Ghost 15 - 1 User (PC)

I accept that this may be a good product IF it works on your machine. I bought to enable backup over my Network - not possible with Windows 7 home premium (thanks a bunch, Microsoft). Norton Ghost showed errors during installation and the program failed when backing up files and folders. If you have Windows 7 PLEASE use the free trial version from the Symantec site to see if you can install it on YOUR PC. If it works and you can run the full backup THEN of course go ahead and buy from Amazon to get your installation code.
Symantec support (and a range of symantec user blogs) offer some unbelievably complex instructions on how to tinker with your computer to try to overcome the errors, but for me, these did not work. 2 days wasted. The blogs suggest that many others share my "bad luck". Better idea: try Norton Ghost on the 30day trial, and if it does not work for you immediately then just forget it. Symantec: Please get your act together and advise how to rectify the missing/failed "Symantec SymSnap VSS Provider" fault or stop pretending your product is compatible with Win7.

It has been a while since I have used Norton Ghost, so I was interested to see how it has been developed over the last few years. My experience of it has always been positive - once the initial back up has been done. This first step can be measured in days rather than hours if you have a substantial hard drive. I guess that is my main disappointment with this software. Given the increasing size of the drives we now work with (who would have guessed that we would have 1.5 tb external HDD in common domestic use a few years ago) I really think that Norton could do something to speed up the initial backup - but maybe usb2 is the limiting factor?

Having done the initial ghost copy the incremental backups are relatively swift, so I have no great complaints. The user interface has been improved and I would think that it is relatively intuitive if you have some idea what you are doing. Certainly if you are a previous user of Ghost you will feel right at home. I have not actually tried wiping my drive and doing a reinstall - so I take it on trust that it will perform if it needs to.

All in all a creditable package - but set aside some time to do the initial work. Oh and if you already have an older version of Ghost I can't really see the point of an upgrade.

Norten Ghost [version] 15 is a quality backup software package that can create backups of files, partitions or harddrives and restore them via the backup file or Ghost's backup recovery disc. It can copy whole hard drives including the entire Windows install as a full disk image, and even restore these as a 'virtual' drive on new hardware [say to keep a perfect copy of old data from a junked PC as a 'virtual hard drive']. Ghost 15 can also backup NAS network drives as well. Although Ghost can backup everything on the drive, you can just back up a few selected folders & files [say just the photos or emails], although for some reason backing up folders seems far slower than a full drive image.

Once a full backup is completed, Ghost can then be set to only back up the selected files that have changed since the last backup, thus making all the next full backups proceed must faster [assuming the majority of files are unchanged]. That first backup of a lot of data files or even a file image of the entire PC install can take a very long while to complete though - largely due to the file compression during backup/restore. And I really mean a very long while by the way - I left Ghost 15 with a few hundred Gb's of folders to backup to my external eSATA 1.5Tb WD Green drive overnight [thinking that would do it] and in the morning a fraction of the backup had been completed with the message 28 hours to go! You could manually copy that amount of data in a fraction of the time, but it would be very difficult to backup new files and keep track of file changes, and thats where backup software of this type scores.

Once Ghost has got your inital backup of crucial folders sorted out, it only swaps in and out the new file/deleted file changes and so backs up far quicker in future. That said my copy of competitor 'Acronis True Image Home 2010' backed up the same files to the same hard drive in just 6 hours [and switched the PC off for me when it has finnished] - granted this was with 'backup file compression' switched off. I haven't found the menu location of the compression selection tool to do that with Norton Ghost yet (it does exist), so Ghost 15 may well also speed up with file compression off (by default compression is on). Compression does signifcantly reduce the storage space requirements of the backup though. One problem with backup software of this sort is that you are reliant on the software to recover your files - so Ghost and True image aren't suitable at all for archiving files long term, it's just for day to day backup to cover against a sudden hard drive failure.

The software interface is quite easy to use though for home PC techie types, and this Ghost 15 is Windows 7 [and XP/Vista] compatible, with minimum system requirements: a 300MHz processor and 512Mb RAM [1GHz/1Gb RAM recommended] - although you will need a typical 20Gb or more of free space to backup all the data. There's advanced compression and encryption offered for the backup files, and you can back up to another hard drive, NAS/internet storage or optical disk [CD, DVD or 25Gb Blu-Ray supported]. You can back up without actually installing Ghost, by using a Ghost backup disk. Ghost 15 also supports older Norten Ghost 10, 12 and 14 created backup files. I use Ghost 15 with 32-bit XP Pro and have no problems so far. However from experience I would advise against using Ghost 15 as the sole backup system for things like the precious family photos or videos, as you don't know if the restore will work until you try it, so also consider a secondary backup such as occasionally archiving key data in easily readable folders by simply copying files across to a massive external eSATA/USB3 hard drive [relatively easy with photos that are usually stored in folders by date anyway].

Ghost 15 supported file systems and devices are: FAT16, FAT16X, FAT32, FAT32X, NTFS, GUID Partition Table (GPT), and Dynamic Disks. The supported hard drives and removable media are: CDR/RW, DVD+-R/RW, Blu-Ray devices, USB and FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices and Iomega Zip and Jaz drives. All excellent, in fact the only reason not to buy 'Norten Ghost 15' is that equally superb 'Acronis True Image Home 2010' offers similar features, appears to back up 'selected folders' far faster and also adds in an 'automatic backup every 5 minutes' tool if required, and perhaps even more usefully the Acronis software is generally £10 cheaper. However whichever package you choose, this is useful backup software for those crucial photos, downloaded files and office documents [as around 6% of new hard drives fail in the first year of use].