Others say...

"GoBack Horror Show"
I type this having lost 8 hours of my valuable time today saving a friend's computer system. He installed Norton GoBack as part of the Systemworks suite a day ago. The system started to fail to boot last night. This morning we decided it was a dead hard drive, which was no big since he'd done a full backup to his secondary hard drive before installing GoBack. So, new hard drive, fresh install of Windows, not the end of the world. What we didn't know was that GoBack changes the partition tables - even on a secondary hard drive. Result: the secondary hard drive will not register on a new Windows install. Crisis. What we thought to be a full backup on a good disk turned into an unusable disk. The only thing that saved his bacon was one last attempt at getting the old primary drive to boot up that succeeded and allowed us to move all his data across the network to a safe drive. After all that, we couldn't even remove GoBack from the machine to salvage the secondary drive, it had to be fully reformatted. Install this piece of excrement at your own risk and pray you don't have any hardware failures.

"How to fix HD after GoBack crash"
I have used GoBack Deluxe 3.xx for about five years and have occassionally had it fail catastrophically as others have. I have been successful at repairing and resuming use of my hard drive and GoBack with the use of "Ultimate Boot CD" in its various incarnations, last using version 3.4 to effect the fix. You must create this boot CD from a download from the web (see Google). Open UBCD after booting it and select "File System Tools" to TestDisk (5.7 was the version on UBCD 3.4), after load select quit and old partitions appear, have it analyze partitions (which have been "destroyed" by GoBack), write each to disk (save) and then write classic MBR to first sector. These instructions may be a bit garbled, as I am referring to my own notes; your mileage may vary, but it sure beats buying a new machine (or HD and or OS) or paying a tech a couple of hundred bucks to do what I just described. Takes about half an hour, even muddling through. Try it.

"Bad Company with bad products and bad support "
Several years ago I had a problem with a Norton product. After a lot of time and effort I finally got the product removed. At that time I decided that a company that would make it so hard to uninstall a product must have no regard for their customers. I have since refused to install any SYMANTEC products and at all my customers I remove any SYMANTEC products. After reading these reviews on GOBACK, SYMANTEC is even worst than I could have ever dreamed. No one should ever trust any thing SYMANTEC ever says about their products. This review is not about GOBACK but feel so strong about SYMANTEC that I wanted to help row their boat into the rocks. Sorry that I had to give it one star as it should be minus many stars.

"Not for Everyone"
Even though GoBack is published for the mass market, you need to school yourself in some of the trade-offs necessary to use it. In my opinion, it's a great product if:

a. you use it on a very modern machine
b. you do not use a sophisticated third-party software firewall (Windows firewall works OK with GoBack, but a router is your best bet for security) unless you do not mind continuous hard drive activity
c. you use it as intended--in other words, read the help files

Me? I use Linux mostly, but when I need to test unfamiliar software for Windows, I use GoBack to protect my WinXP Pro OS and it does the job.


"Almost lost me, but back..."
I have been a die-hard user of GoBack since I first used it back on MS Windows Millenium. I upgraded to GB version 3.1 for Windows XP Pro, and to be honest it has saved my bacon many times, albeit that once it is installed and working, one can be rather 'reckless' with ones's computer.

There are a few problems with it, like when a lot of disk activity causes it to lose track of things. I combine normal backups and disk partition imaging (as is good practise) to cater to these odd moments. Of course, the documentation does warn about such occurences, when things just cannot be coped with by the GB software, so if I know I will be transferring a lot of data to a GB protected drive, and I know that I do not need GoBack at that time, I just disable GB until the major disk writing I am doing is done, and then re-enable. This also alleviates the long waits of disk activity afterwards (where GB has to 'catch up') as reported in many places here... hah, I too was first alarmed by such disk activity when I first bought the software years ago, but now I know what to expect, I know what GoBack is good for and it's limitations.

Primarily, GoBack is best used when you need to just go back to a point in time recently to make everything as it was before hand, or to go back to a previous version of a file that might have been written over. It is not the be all end all of backups, but just part of my arsenal.

Now, after upgrading just recently (yesterday) to a new Sony VAIO, with all its InstantOn and disk recovery software, version 3.1 died a death with a nice unfriendly Blue Screen, and continual re-booting. Not nice, and certainly had me a little worried that my time with GoBack had finally come to an end. I had to stop the boot process and revert Windows to a previous stable state. My Symantec experiences vary quite a lot, and I have to say that I no longer use their software, so I decided to read all of the reviews here on the Norton version 4.x... I was very sad to see so many tails of woe! Still, I figured the $30 upgrade fee was worth a go myself... I downloaded version 4.2.

And guess what...? No more blue-screen of death, and it properly handles the disk recovery partition correctly. The InstantOn, where I would normally have the ability to play DVDs without loading the OS does not work however. Not a bif problem for me, as booting the OS is pretty quick these days...

So, after only a day with the new version, so far so good. We'll see... I might add that installing GoBack on to a system is certainly best done on a clean boot/install, and/or after a major disk image backup. This program is doing some sophisticated stuff to the drive, so knowing this, don't take any chances like some of the users here have done. Back up your drive completely before installing GoBack, as this gives you a chance to iron out any problems. So far, it seems the latest version (4.2)certainly works okay with the latest U1400 1.2 GHz chip that is in my VAIO, although I don't know how it would go in the dual processor systems, something for someone to try and post here perhaps...

So, my recommendations: If you can survive without it and normal imaging and backups work for you, then maybe you don't need this software. If you are prepared to give it a try on either a new OS installation, or after doing a system image backup, I'd say, give it a go... If it does work, it is worth the effort. Good luck to all who do...