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| Norton Ghost 12 (PC) | 
 enlarge | From: Norton from Symantec
Category: Software
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  (4 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1748
Platforms: Windows Xp, Microsoft Xp Media Center Edition, Windows Xp Professional, Windows Xp Home Edition, Windows Vista
Media: CD-ROM
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 7.2 x 1.3
MPN: 11866538
EAN: 5397011715302
ASIN: B000Q87R1Q
Release Date: January 8, 2007
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Product Description
Protects your computer with advanced backup and recovery.- Full system backup (disk image) ? Backs up everything on a hard drive or partition
- File and folder back up ? Choose only the specific files and folders you want to back up rather than sav
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| Customer Reviews:
 Does what it says if you can work out how to do it March 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have been using Ghost 10 for quite a while. Ghost 10 didn't have the most intuitive of intuitive of interfaces but I quickly got used to its quirks. I had read that the new program had made this all a lot clearer and on first sight it is. It is much larger with nice pie charts and graphics showing you information about what backups you have. After struggling with it for hours, I decided it was far less intuitive or just the same but involving more operations. If you want to delete recovery points, what do you want - tasks or tools? What these people never seem to do when designing these things is to ask their secretaries or girl friends to sit down and try and work it out. They might get some useful suggestions.
The additional feature not found in Ghost 10 is the file or folder backup. This is backed up separately on your external hard drive and is not incorporated in the main backup. You can select file types which will backup all files of that type. Then there is My Documents which will back up this (minus the files in My Pictures and My Music as the 'folders' for these are, in fact, short cuts not real folders). Then you can define file(s) or folder(s) which change rapidly and you need to back up frequently.
The main problem with this section of the program is viewing the folders or files you have backed up. You have to enter a file name in a search box to view the backed up files. I never know the names of the files I'm working with, especially ones with names like xcve6755.jpg. There is an 'advanced' search but this depends on date, file size, etc. I have eventually brought up what I want to I am new sure how I did it! Then you can check if it is backed up properly. The same applies to restore. What is needed is a facility to view all the files and folders of each defined backup so you can explore and then choose.
I do not often have to resort to the Help menu with most programs but you will with this. The printed manual you get with the box is a pale shadow of its predecessor, on economic grounds no doubt. The manual tells you about installation, creating a Recovery Disc etc but virtually nothing about day to day operations. This is all found on the comprehensive help that comes with the program. If your computer dies on you, however, these will not be available to you. If you have access to another computer, look in the Ghost 12 folder in C:/Programs and copy the help file and store it on a memory stick. Alternatively, print out the help pages (or copy and paste to a Word document (over 100 sides). It is essential to know how to boot the computer with the Recovery Disk to rescue it and you will need step by step guidance unless you are very computer literate, so at least print this out as it is not in the manual.
The Help pages are generally good but are too cursory at times and, it seems, when you most need them. The index and search facilities are often unhelpful, bringing up long lists of topics leaving you unsure as to which to look up. I have found my Word document version better as I can search by single words or phrases and bring the text up.
A word about the Recovery Disc. You use this to boot the computer into basic Windows to enable you to overwrite and restore the whole of your hard disk. When you install, you can run a scan from the product CD to validate drivers. It will tell you if any drivers are missing from the CD (not the computer)to enable recovery to run. After installation, you make your own disk by burning a recovery CD which Ghost ensures includes copies of these drivers. Be sure to test the disk to make sure it works. This procedure is NOT described in the manual.
This is a good program but let down by the time needed to learn where things are. Better sub-menus would solve a lot of this. These are mainly problems for the new user and time will resolve them. There may be other products which do a similar job which are easier to use but Ghost 10 has restored my computer on a couple of occasions. The alternative would have been to reinstall Windows and every application, one by one, and then the data - a good day's work if you are lucky and a year off your life. Don't underestimate the value of Ghost 12 - it will restore your operating system, the registry, your applications and your data in an hour or two while you have a cup of tea.
 Symantec buys company and ruins product February 1, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
Absolute rubbish. There should be a minus stars rating.
Drive Image was a fine product, Symantec indulged in their usual practice of eliminating competition, and ruined a good product. If you have Vista you are better off using the tools that already exist in it, or upgrading from the Home Edition to get them. Do not even think of using Ghost if you have RAID.
Absolute rubbish November 30, 2007
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
Pretty interface and all looks very professional but simply cannot be relied on, and doesnt work anyway! Wanted to clone (copy disk) my boot hard disk (XP) to another clean drive with lots of space, formatted and error free. C:\ drive was around 10gb and I was sending it to D:\ drive which was 20gb. It got to the end of the copy routine, about 30 minutes, having copied around 8gb of 10gb and said it *failed* with the error "too few clusters". I checked the website and it suggested running chkdsk /f which I did, and even tried chkdsk /r with no errors. I tried three times and failed every one. Rubbish software. Rubbish support. Rubbish company. Now dumping it and looking elsewhere.
 Solid and reliable, but may not be worth upgrading from Ghost 10 October 15, 2007
50 out of 50 found this review helpful
There a lot you can say about Symantec - much of it bad and some of it unrepeatable - but you can't argue with a piece of software that consistently does exactly what it claims to do. Unlike the utter disaster that was Acronis True Image 10 - whose popularity among magazine reviewers can only be based on none of them ever having actually used it - Ghost 10 competently got on with the job of backing up my system, and, once, just as competently restoring it after a disaster.
And now there's Ghost 12 - but although it has a number of new features over Ghost 10, some of them are going to be of pretty limited value to a home user with one or two personal machines. The remote management and LightsOut Restore features might be useful to network sysadmins but they're of no use to me. Similarly the integrated google desktop feature is probably useful to some people, somewhere, but I'm not one of them. It's a lot prettier than Ghost 10, though, with a new interface design and much nicer and more detailed menus. The ability to back up specific files, file-types and folders is a nice new feature, although individual items can already be selected and restored from within a complete disk image so it's not an essential one.
One thing that has been much improved in Ghost 12 is a feature that hopefully you'll never see. Ghost 10 took an incredibly (and nail-bitingly) long time to boot into the recovery environment from the CD. Ghost 12 is much faster and the recovery environment has undergone the same facelift as the user interface. Beware, though, of the broken new "feature" that claims to let you create a customised bootable recovery CD that includes system-specific drivers not included in the standard recovery CD. I ran this feature to test it out, and it identified about a half-dozen things it thought should be included in a customised CD. Some of them (the JMicron RAID driver my motherboard uses) seemed logical to include, while others (part of the Kaspersky antivirus engine) seemed a bit eccentric. Ghost repeatedly failed to burn this customised CD for no explicable reason, though it did let me create an iso image that I burned to a blank CD with Nero. This customised CD booted alright, but refused to identify any of the dozen or so backups I'd made on my external USB drives, and when I selected them manually it refused to open them for a restore. When I used the plain old uncustomised bootable CD that came with the box, it worked just fine, identified all my backups and opened them without a hitch.
Apart from the useless customisable recovery CD feature - which loses it points as I have this old-fashioned idea that advertised software features should work work out of the box - Ghost 12 is a good solid product that I use every day to create incremental images of my system and data partitions. If you don't already have a disk imager, Ghost 12 will be the one to get - ignore the noise about Acronis True Image. Ghost may cost more but in my experience it doesn't generate fatal errors or inexplicably corrupt its own backup archives. If you already have Ghost 10, though, then you probably won't gain much by upgrading unless you desperately need to be able to restore a system remotely.
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