Norton Ghost 12 reliability?

[sukarof]

I am testing Norton Ghost 12 for a friend and I wonder about its recover reliability.

Personally I use Shadow Protect and Image for win before that. Those two software has proven to rock solid when it comes to reliability when restoring, not a single glitch the numerous times i recovered with them.
As I said I am testing Ghost 12 to learn it so I can learn my friend to use it. Seeing how easy it is and that it takes incrementals with a breeze and no need to baby sit it on my system like I have to do with SP and the scheduling is easy to understand, I am becoming a bit interrested to use it my self. (I know I am a software junkie jumping from one software to another :) )

Shadow Protect has some problems on my machine that I dont seem to solve. Incrementals suddenly, with no apparent reason, takes the same amount of time as a full backup for example. So I am thinking since SP is not aimed at computer systems that change alot (it is aimed at the corporate market) I thought I might try a old friend (used to use v.5 years ago.)

Norton Ghost uses the WinPE, like SP, so I cant try the recovery disk unless I ask for a special key (like SP)
And since I have this GAOTD key for my EAZ-FIX that probably(?) will stop working if I restore a image before I had a chance to test EAZ-FIX (for the period of time that this kind of software needs to be tested before one can say it is reliable, which is up to two, three months ime)

So I would like to have som real life experiences from Ghost 12 users, especially those who have done, say 4-5, restores. Is it solid?
All I have to do is to put in the recovery CD, boot, tell it what backup file I want to restore and where. Take a coffe and when I come back my system is at the state of any point in time I´ve chosen, Right? No problems using USB disks?

[mata7]

all i can tell you is that i never have any fail backup or restore image whit ghost i mean never, and i restore maybe like 40 image, i dont use shedule cause i know when i want to backup

[ratchet]

I have G 10 and have restored a few files from my ex HD with it (Ghost and the HD). I manually backup to my ex HD every few weeks. The directions state that you should try to boot from their disc to make sure it works but I've been "afraid" to try it. So in theory, should some incompatible software crash my pc, what do I do?

[Nick Rhodes]

I Have ghost 10 also and I've only had to restore system images a couple of times, but I do update my images monthly and so far never had a problem (I store mine on DVDs)

[Hairy Coo]

-{ Quote: "



Shadow Protect has some problems on my machine that I dont seem to solve. Incrementals suddenly, with no apparent reason, takes the same amount of time as a full backup for example. So I am thinking since SP is not aimed at computer systems that change alot (it is aimed at the corporate market) I thought I might try a old friend (used to use v.5 years ago.)

" }-

Sukarof-This problem,which I think everyone has in the current version,but apparently a fix may be coming,is due to the following;

"When incrementals take as long as a full backup, generally this means that the machine was not cleanly shutdown. In other words, inorder for fast incremental tracking to continue, the computer must have a normal shutdown and bootup sequence. If it was powered off abnormallh, rebooted with the reset button or blue-screened, then ShadowProtect loses its ability to track the incremental and it must do an incremental repair. This can take as long a full backup because it has to compare the current snapshot with the previous point in time. Once this occurs, however, then the following backups will be fast incrementals once again."

Scooter(SP)

[demoneye]

GHOST OwNz no argue....been using it over 10 years with over 500 iimages made/restore/clone nver got any fault

cheers:dry:

[sukarof]

Thanks all for sharing. I like Ghost even though it takes twice the time to do full images (and I guess the restore of 44GB takes longer than the 18-19 minutes it takes for SP to restore) but G12 is easy and doesnt bother me that much so I think my friend will be pleased, he just wants things to work without having to bother about anything.
Now I only have to figure out if it is usabel with EAZ-FIX. I have noticed that G12 gets confused when I rollback to a previous snapshot and G12 discovers a incremental from the future :)

-{ Quote: "Sukarof-This problem,which I think everyone has in the current version,but apparently a fix may be coming,is due to the following;

"When incrementals take as long as a full backup, generally this means that the machine was not cleanly shutdown. In other words, inorder for fast incremental tracking to continue, the computer must have a normal shutdown and bootup sequence. If it was powered off abnormallh, rebooted with the reset button or blue-screened, then ShadowProtect loses its ability to track the incremental and it must do an incremental repair. This can take as long a full backup because it has to compare the current snapshot with the previous point in time. Once this occurs, however, then the following backups will be fast incrementals once again."

Scooter(SP)" }-

Thanks, that makes sense and it is nice that the problem is acknowledged.
I wonder if it is FDISR that doesnt shut down my windows properly..? Coz most of the time I use FDISR to reboot to another snapshot so maybe FDISR does a "dirty" shutdown.. I cant remember that I use the reset button that often and I havent had bluescreens for years, well atleast I cant remeber the last time I had one.

[sukarof]

I have now done two restores with Ghost 12 and restoring was without problems both times :thumb: I didnt do any verify of the images.
5 minutes to restore 14GB is quite impressive imo, that would make it as fast as ShadowProtect I think.

Unfortunately it doesnt seem to restore (or backup?) the MBR correctly. I tried with and without the option to restore MBR before recovering from the boot cd..
Reason for believing that is that I have EAZ-FIX that "owns" the MBR, and after restore EAZ-FIX wont boot and when booted into windows EF tells me that the driver wasnt initialized correctly and I´ll have to uninstall and reinstall EF. It boots to windows directly. But maybe I did something wrong?

Other than that I think I can conclude that there is no problems with reliability wint Ghost 12 and I can recommend it to my friend (he doesnt use the computer the same "advanced" way as I do so the MBR thing isnt that important to him.