After hearing how Norton Ghost was the "best professional backup system available," I bought into the hype and decided to use it to back up my family's laptops to the main home server. The day I bought it was the best day of use for it.
First, I found that I could only do disc images, and not files and folders backup, because of VSS services or some other excuse. I was directed to arcane technical articles asking me to change the registry and run command line utilities. I bought a software package, not a computer science degree. If you can't figure out how to make it work on Windows 7, don't advertise on the box that it's compatible with Windows 7. Furthermore, 7's been out for a long time now, and the problems remain unfixed for an "out of the box" installation.
Nevertheless, I figured that if the weekly images worked fine, I could probably live without nightly files and folders backups, despite the increased risk. Of course, none of the backups have actually run in over 3 months. Well, that's not correct. This "premiere backup system" dutifully launches the backup job on each machine on the scheduled night and time, and each machine then just sits at "Reconciling volume -- 1%". It doesn't matter how long you wait. Machines have been left on and connected for hours, days, even over a weekend. But the backup job just never finished. Of course, tech support on this issue has also been terrible, which I'm not surprised by, given my previous struggle.
I'm through with Ghost, and probably with Norton and Symantec products in general. Selling products that don't do what's advertised on the box is only slightly worse than tech support that's arcane and unhelpful in resolving issues. I have no trust in Ghost to protect the data on my family's laptops and on my network, and I'll have no faith in other products to do what they claim to do, either.
After hearing how Norton Ghost was the "best professional backup system available," I bought into the hype and decided to use it to back up my family's laptops to the main home server. The day I bought it was the best day of use for it.
First, I found that I could only do disc images, and not files and folders backup, because of VSS services or some other excuse. I was directed to arcane technical articles asking me to change the registry and run command line utilities. I bought a software package, not a computer science degree. If you can't figure out how to make it work on Windows 7, don't advertise on the box that it's compatible with Windows 7. Furthermore, 7's been out for a long time now, and the problems remain unfixed for an "out of the box" installation.
Nevertheless, I figured that if the weekly images worked fine, I could probably live without nightly files and folders backups, despite the increased risk. Of course, none of the backups have actually run in over 3 months. Well, that's not correct. This "premiere backup system" dutifully launches the backup job on each machine on the scheduled night and time, and each machine then just sits at "Reconciling volume -- 1%". It doesn't matter how long you wait. Machines have been left on and connected for hours, days, even over a weekend. But the backup job just never finished. Of course, tech support on this issue has also been terrible, which I'm not surprised by, given my previous struggle.
I'm through with Ghost, and probably with Norton and Symantec products in general. Selling products that don't do what's advertised on the box is only slightly worse than tech support that's arcane and unhelpful in resolving issues. I have no trust in Ghost to protect the data on my family's laptops and on my network, and I'll have no faith in other products to do what they claim to do, either.
It sounds like you spent a lot of money for no return. I haven't looked at creating images over the network with Ghost for a long time but I recall it wasn't easy. Could you create Ghost images (recovery points) to local partitions on the same computer? Or did you only want to create images over the network? Were you doing straight forward imaging to a network share or were you using the Agent?
I have quite a lot of experience doing backups across a wireless home network and the only real problem (other than throughput rate) was in getting Ghost to be able to get through the firewall.
I would add that if you do not desire to work on the problem you have with Ghost, Symantec does have a 60 day refund policy. So if you purchased it within the last 60 days you can request a refund.
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