What our customer's say!

"Helpful so long as you're patient", I've used this product for four years. While I've been displeased with it at least a half a dozen times, I eventually got used to its being "moody" and it behaves like it should when I need backups onto CD's. However, if(as another reviewer wrote), Symantec no longer offers tech support, I couldn't enthusiastically endorse it.

"NG2003 and large backups", I got this software mainly because of its Windows interface. I have also been using older versions without hassle.

With time everything gets bigger and larger including the volume of data stored on hard disks. So, I will just mention the problems I had with reference to this context:

- If the total length of the labels exceed a certain limit (e.g. if you are trying to back up logical drives with labels like
"N_D1P4_Bks_Phys_Astro_Math_Sci" + "O_D1P5_EE_Tex_Hobbies" + "P_D1P6_CompuDataBase"+ etc. in one go) then you are sure to get a message that NG2003 does not support such long names. The solution is to break up the job into a number of smaller units.
- The program hangs if the right USB version (connection) is not chosen. No messages.
- The program can backup onto large hard disks (with 48bit Lba enable) but is unable to read the files later if the total backup exceeds a certain limit (reports a corrupted hard disk). It can read the earlier backups again once the later backups have been deleted (i.e. when the total size goes down below that 'certain limit'). [Note: I have not carefully investigated this limit - but roughly my guess is that it lies around 160GB].

I would go for an earlier version (if you are still conversant with DOS?) or buy a later version (no comments yet!). Symantec no longer supports it.
It, however, is a very convenient program for small backups.



"Faithful service for almost 5 years", Bought in late 2002 after using previous versions, this is still the most reliable and fastest version ever. From win 95, 98 to winXP SP2, its a workhorse and does it job flawlessly.

I would like to upgrade to a newer version of Ghost and am investigating the pros and cons of doing so.

"This product is dead as far as Symantec support is concerned", Like alot of developers all i needed was a basic imaging tool, nothing fancy and after reading how everyone swore by 2003 i bought the product. Bad move as symantec NO LONGER SUPPORTS NORTON GHOST 2003. This product is dead as far as Symantec support is concerned. To quote there web site "We no longer provide technical support for Norton Ghost 2003. To continue receiving support, we suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of Norton Ghost, which we offer to previous users at a discounted price."

You are pretty much on your own or at the nercy of message boards as far as installing or degugging this version and believe me i had quite a bit of debugging to do on this product especially as i run MS XP Pro SP 2.

I therefore agree with a previous reviewer who stated that selling this product is a ripoff,

"Nice Product, hard to find.", This is the best backup solution I have ever used. I read somewhere that Norton removed some features in its successor. I am happy with it.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Ghost 9.0 a Bust", I agree - one star is too much.

I am running XP on a two computer network with a 250 gig drive connected to the router for backup. That's three strikes against me in trying to get Ghost to work. It doesn't like XP; it doesn't like networks and it doesn't know about big backup drives (but will probably work if you want to make a backup on a dozen cds).

The engine in this turkey is DOS and seems to have been bought from Iomega some years ago. It is covered up with slick tutorials. In trying to make it run on my little network it demanded a network driver. I don't have one and I don't know what my nic requires because Dell sent it all complete and, although hardly a novice, I resent being asked for information at this low system level. In this enlightened age it hardly seems customer friendly.

I despaired of getting Ghost to work on my network so I plugged the backup drive directly to the desktop. To perform a backup, Ghost then demanded an entirely clean disk. Exactly what I want to avoid. Perhaps it would be possible to partition the drive and get this turkey to work but I have run out of time and patience.

On line support was a guy named Arun in India. Friendly chap, anxious to help, weak grasp of English, and his advice seemed to be canned fragments of wisdom and tips from a library.

I use the Norton antivirus program and it works well but is mortally slow in loading.

Unless you want to use many CDs for a backup don't get this program.



"Ghost 2003 Wouldn't Complete System Archive on External CDs", Although I am hardly a novice PC user, I must say that it never occurred to me that the functioning of an archiving software product would depend so much on hardware.

I have a Toshiba internal CD drive with XP, not even a year old, but it turned out that this drive was not on the list of supported CD drives. By the way, the system requirements on the box do not make it plain that this product supports only certain CD drives. YOU MUST CHECK THE SYMANTEC LIST OF SUPPORTED CD DRIVES BEFORE DETERMINING WHETHER THIS PRODUCT MIGHT WORK FOR YOU.

I have used Norton products for years and have been very satisfied. However, I must say that Ghost 2003 has been a sad exception. I tried 650MB and 700MB good-brand CDs, but got the archiving process to complete a system-image backup and verify on CDs only once out of maybe 10 tries. My latest try got through 7 out of 8 CDs and then bombed out with an error.

In reading the reviews of the Acronis and Powerquest archiving software products, I see that they don't get consistently high reviews either. It appears that either the software works on your hardware, or you're out of luck as far as archiving is concerned, and you may blow away your disk. Most of the reviews for all these products are 1 or 5, not many 3s.

"Do not buy for Windows XP", 1 star is too much for this product. It is completely incompatible with Windows XP, and technical support is very slow and utterly useless. The program always crashes under XP and has never worked regardless of whether you run it from DOS or Windows. I have contacted technical support through email over 10 times, and they consistently repeat the same suggestions that I had already tried on my own. They do not even bother to keep a record of what they have already tried. I have not bothered to pay the $30 to call technical support for more useless suggestions. While I have wasted my money on a product that has never worked, I hope that you will learn from my mistake and buy something else. If you have ideas for a working alternative for backing up an entire hard drive, please post them here.

"This product and the support suck ", Drive image 2003

This product and the support suck
If you have a lap top and a usb drive you are out of luck. Or at least the version I bought in January 2005 did not support this configuration. It gave me some kind of error message so I looked on line with little result except that some one with a similar configuration recommended getting a competitors product. So I called support. In voice Jail I was told that I would have to pay $30 or something like that to talk to a human. After waiting on the phone listening to muzak for 2 hours (I am not exaggerating) I hung up. I emailed the tech support (which is free) and some time later got a response that pointed me to a web page (that I had already read) but on reexamination said that I could not back up my disk to a USB drive (tuff luck!). It never mentioned this on the box and the clerk never mentioned it either when I described what I wanted it for. In fairness to the clerk I may not have mentioned weather it was a lap top or not.

Unfortunately I can not return this $70 peace of !@#$% as I sent in the bar-code for a rebate. I plan to avoid all products from this company in the future if at all possible. Now I am trying to find that web page that recommended a different product.

A'


"Problems with CD writer", I bought and installed Ghost 2003 on a computer running Windows 98 and using NTI CD-Maker 2000. Ghost disables the writing ability of the CD Writer for any purpose, not just for use with Ghost. When I uninstalled Ghost, the CD Writer again worked perfectly. As far as I can tell, Ghost is absolutely useless with the system that I have. It might work on other systems, but I did not buy it for other systems.