Norton Ghost 2003

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

Objective: Backup my primary partition accross an ethernet cable to a mapped network drive (my friend's PC), split the image into pieces, burn into DVDs and migrate everything to a new 160GB HD PC with similar hardwares

Process: Configured everything with NG 2003 GUI (choosing compression rate, NIC driver, typing in static IP, mask, gateway, etc) and NG PC-DOS interface did the rest : )

Outcome: All 5 DVDs were restored successfully; mission accomplished in the first attempt!


Norton Ghost usability and documentation   June 22, 2004
Malcolm Rigg (Crowthorne, Berkshire United Kingdom)
24 out of 27 found this review helpful

I have bought from Amazon a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 (claimed to support XP) and have been unable to get it to produce an image of my C: disk - the objective being to restore to the larger new hard disk and abandon the existing C: disk which has given intermittent errors.
I have tried loads of different combinations without any success. I have tried master slave on a single IDE channel, on two channels both as master, and so on.
I have also tried to clone the C: partition to a second disk - this doesn't work either.
I have two 40G IDE drives and a new 160Gb drive which is partitioned into two. One 40Gb drive is the original system disk of the Dell machine, the other is a single primary partition currently formatted FAT32 - I have previously tried it as NTFS.
I have uninstalled the software and reinstalled it and it still fails.
I am trying to create an exact copy of the C: disk onto the primary partition of the new 160Gb disk.
The feedback mechanism on the symantec website is spectacularly user unfriendly and I do not propose to phone and pay for technical support for software which doesn't work - in my experience.
The manual is also spectacularly user unfriendly when it deals with "What to do if a task fails" - it offers no help at all.
I have got so pissed off that I am seriously considering rejecting the software as unfit for purpose!


Quite shockingly poor   May 5, 2004
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

Generally I love Norton products and rate them very highly, but I'm afraid this is a major exception. On my PC, I've found that any backup that requires more than 3-5 CDs generally fails. Also, when I've tried to burn to a DVD instead of a CD, I always get the message that the media isn't supported, and a suggestion that I try other brands.

But I'm starting to run out of different brands, and still no success!

Up to now, I've been giving Norton the benefit of the doubt, reckoning that there was probably something about my particular machine that was causing a problem. But I've now tried the software on 3 different machines running various types of windows, and it's far from reliable on any of them.

Personally, I'm very grateful to the other reviewers who have suggested alternative products, because I urgently need a *reliable* backup solution - and I'm afraid this isn't it.


Excellent Product   April 3, 2004
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

Once again Norton is the industry-leader of antivirus products in my opinion. Not only does it block all the newest virii and trojans, but also helps against spyware and all the other rubbish that thrives all over the internet. The simplicity of the software allows you to install the software, and then just leave it. It will update itself without ever needing to bother you (unless you want it to).

Fully recommended.


Really poor   March 3, 2004
17 out of 19 found this review helpful

Check before you buy...

I found it quite sensitive to the type of media used. Fair enough, one might think - not an uncommon situation. However, you would think it would at least be self consistent(!) - amazingly I found that quite often I would create a backup, verify the image with Ghost, and then when it came to restore time, Ghost would say the image was corrupt. V. V. Poor!!

There are also other problems that can easily catch you out - e.g. if you are a laptop user without on board USB 2: There is support for USB hard drives, CD writers, etc, but... there is no support whatsoever for these devices via PCMCIA USB hubs. This is a very basic connectivity requirement that I assumed would be present, but its not.

After trying many of these utilities, I opted for Acronis True Image. It supports USB hubs, has a decent DOS boot interface, and has a lot of other decent features - for my mind the best option available.