Norton Ghost 2003: Amazon.co.uk: Software

Product details

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Backups, upgrades and disk management made easier with Norton Ghost 2003's Windows interface--and it supports NTFS drives under Windows XP.

It's vital to take backups of your system in case anything goes wrong; rather than just copying your files, Ghost 2003 takes a copy of your entire hard drive, files, applications, Windows and all, onto another hard drive or partition, or onto removable media (whether that's a stack of blank CDs or DVDs or an external FireWire, USB or network drive). If you want to copy the contents of one hard drive straight onto another--for instance when you upgrade to a new PC--you can do that directly over a network, USB or parallel connection rather than needing to save the disk image and then restore it.

Ghost 2003 saves the recovery software onto the CD or DVD; for hard drive copies you'll want to create a recovery floppy. And you don't need to actually restore the whole drive just to get a single file back; the Ghost Explorer utility lets you browse through a disk image and retrieve an individual file or folder. You can also check that an image file isn't corrupt without opening or restoring it.

Unless you're backing up a second hard drive that doesn't have Windows on, Ghost needs to work in DOS for storing your disk information as well as when it's time to recover it. Although you get a friendly Windows front end to start with and an icon in the Windows system tray to run backups from, it will need to restart your PC so you'll want to leave it working. The DOS-based utilities like the partition manager are powerful but complex to use. Experienced users will be glad of new features like support for NTFS and burning straight onto CD or DVD discs, but beginners might find the advanced features a little complex, even with the comprehensive manual and the excellent step-by-step tutorials. --Mary Branscombe

Manufacturer's Description

Norton Ghost 2003 is a flexible and robust imaging solution designed to provide home PC users and small businesses with high-performance utilities for system upgrading, backup and recovery. Symantec's Norton Ghost 2003 allows customers to save valuable time while protecting their data by providing an easy-to-use Windows-based interface that streamlines the backup and restore process. Norton Ghost 2003 offers small business customers the ability to save and restore images from network drives, providing an ideal solution for protecting critical data from computer disasters. The product allows users to take advantage of the latest high-performance storage and data transfer devices including USB 1.1, 2.0, DVD and FireWire.For increased flexibility, Norton Ghost 2003 supports a wide range of file systems including Linux EXT3, EXT2, Microsoft FAT and NTFS. Norton Ghost offers cloning capabilities for an entire hard drive or specified partitions while automatically determining the partition sizes for the destination drive. Users are also provided with the ability to manipulate disk images, allowing them to easily restore individual files, directories, or entire drives from a Ghost image. Norton Ghost 2003 also enables customers to back up hard disk drives by writing disk images directly to many popular CD-R/ CD-RW and DVD/ DVD-RW drives, as well as a variety of the most popular removable magnetic media, including ZIP, JAZ and more. This functionality offers users the tools needed to conduct weekly backups of their data and perform specific events, such as migrating to a new operating system.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

Don't use it to backup to mapped network drive 26 Sep 2003

By Mr. Finn Skovgaard

I bought this product because I wanted to take backups and store them on another computer's hard disk. The two computers are connected through a local network, and their hard drives are mutually mapped to drive letters. The specifications for Norton Ghost say that the program considers such a mapped drive as a local drive.

Reality is more complex. You have to specify technical data for your network card, load its DOS driver into Norton and to decrypt many undocumented error codes. To do this, you must have at least good technical knowledge. It's not enough just to specify drive letter "X" and then it works transparently as Symantec would have you believe.

Symantec replied promptly to my requests for support, but they were unable to make the backup work on an up to date and quite ordinary Windows XP computer. Their replies were sometimes a bit too "techie jargon", but they replied when asked for more explanations.

In the end, I gave up and returned the product for a refund. It may be good for other purposes, but I would not recommend it for backup to a mapped network drive.

Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful

Works for me... 14 Dec 2003

By A Customer

If like me you are somewhat perplexed by the erratic reviews that this and other ‘disk imaging’ utilities receive, both here and on amazon.com (always a useful source of opinion…), then hopefully this one may help.

I’d used Ghost 2002 extensively and agree that it was far from user friendly, especially for the novice. I was forced to upgrade because it supports XP’s NTFS.

Although I’m an experienced PC user, I probably only utilise ~10% of the product’s capabilities, ie I simply want a complete backup image of my main hard drive for fast recovery purposes. Whilst the product claims to backup directly to CD/DVD, my experience with this method has been problematic and is probably related to the painfully slow burning process rather than Ghost itself, but do first check your drive for compatibility against Norton’s database. Instead, I back up by first creating images on another hard drive (or partition, space permitting) and then burning those to CD using XP or Nero. [Tip: using the ‘-split=700’ command, a large drive can be saved into multiple 700 MB images for later burning if required].

The 2003 upgrade is a definite improvement on its predecessor with a much friendlier user interface and backup/restore capability from within Windows. Whilst my backup method may not be acceptable to everyone, it works reliably and that’ll do me.

Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful

Outdone by Drive Image 2002 these days 28 Oct 2003

By P. Biggs

I use Ghost for home and work. Versions 2001, 2002 and the Corporate Edition (ver7)were all very good and worked flawlessly if you knew about boot disks and only wanted sub XP images backed up to a second hard drive. This is a very disappointing edition. Every XP backup that I have done(many different images and PCs) has failed, with 'corrupt images'. Additionally the firewire facility does not work on my external Lacie firewire disks. Plus 'Drive Image' allows backups to the same physical hard disk, which is good for laptops and one-disk desktop users. Ghost 2003 does not. The interface within Windows is very good and now does not require a boot disk for backups, but if the images are no good this doesn't really help does it ? Lets hope the next version is better. In my opinion this product is not the premier backup solution anymore.

Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

Customer Discussions