Norton Ghost 15 has a seriious problem in that on restoring a folder tree, symbolic file links are restored, BUT NG15 goes one step further and stuffs the target of the symbolic link with 0 bytes. It positively should not do that. NG15 does indeed know that what it has in hand is a symbolic link because the link itself is correctly restored as this dir listing shows:
Directory of H:\NG15Test\SymbolicFileLinks
08/24/2014 05:42 PM <SYMLINK> TestJunk.txt [..\RealFiles\TestJunk.txt]
1 File(s) 0 bytes
2 Dir(s) 52,330,115,072 bytes free
When NG15 did the restore, it did not stop at just restoring the link. It filled ..\RealFiles\TestJunk.txt with 0 bytes, destroying the data that had been there. That final step is just plain stupid. Unix gunzip is smart enough not to do that and it has been around over 30 years.
Complete details, including a .bat script to reproduce the problem, are here: http://www.rtbaileyphd.com/NG15SeriousProblem/
I do not have SSR myself or I would test SSR to see if it has the same problem. So I decdided to challenge existing users to try this on their own machines and report the results back to this forum.