I recently needed to use Ghost to fully recover documents, photos, music, data, programs, emails, etc., and I thought my experience might be helpful to those of you who run Ghost regularly in the background, but may not have had to actually recover anything...yet.
Over the five year period of 2009 – 2014, my wife and I used a pair of 2TB Western Digital external drives with the built-in My Book software for backing up each of our PC’s. However, I was never comfortable with nor confident in using My Book because, although I guess it was doing what it was programmed from the factory to do, I wanted more control and flexibility in setting up and recovering the exact type of data backup we needed. So, I started researching the various backup software packages available on the market. It quickly became obvious that Norton Ghost had all the features and controls (and positive reviews) I was looking for, so about 15 months ago I bought two of the “newest” Ghost 15 version packages for about $9 each on eBay for each of our PCs. I know some of you are now laughing - because soon after making this incredible bargain purchase, I discovered the reason for the low price was because Symantec had recently introduced its new Symantec System Recovery (SSR) s/w, and declared they were no longer supporting Ghost! My research had included the technical details (and price) about the new SSR, but I didn't catch the key fact that Ghost was no longer being supported by Symantec.
Well, I can now declare that my Ghost 15 purchase turned out to be the best $9 ever spent, because about 3 weeks ago we experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure on my wife’s 5-yr old desktop PC. She’s an avid photographer and about 700GBs of high resolution photographs and related Photoshop data were stored on her PC’s 1TB HDD. Fortunately for us, all of those photographs and data (plus all of her documents, emails, and everything else) were backed up perfectly by Ghost 15 on the Western Digital 2TB external HDD. Rather than get a new hard drive for her 5-yr old PC, we made the decision to buy a new desktop PC with a 2TB hard drive. Once I got her new PC (using Win 8.1) set up and operating, which included connecting and mounting the Western Digital external HDD where all the backup data from the old PC was stored, the next major step would be installing Ghost 15 and applying its license key on the new PC, then figuring out how and what I needed to recover from the WD backup drive by using Ghost. To my surprise and dismay, I soon discovered that Ghost 15 would not accept the license key, and that Ghost would function for only 30 trial days on the new Win 8.1 PC! With the outstanding aid of several helpful members and their posts on this forum thread, I learned that my data recovery puzzle would be easily solved by running Ghost 15’s Recovery Point Browser, while the 30-day trial counted down.
When I first opened the Recovery Point Browser and selected the most recent My Computer full image backup, I saw all the familiar data folders, trees and structures, and I breathed a big sigh of relief knowing the recovery path would be similar to working with good ole Windows Explorer. So, I began the Recovery journey by clicking on the Documents & Settings folder to see what was inside, but soon realized it wasn’t exactly where I wanted to start, so I closed it up and looked elsewhere. Then, I remembered the Users folder, and in my wife’s User folder I found practically everything I was looking for: documents, photos, music etc. Of all the data we wanted to recover, the Music files were the least important and could be recovered by other means (e.g. by ripping all the CDs again), if the Ghost recovery didn’t work. So, for the first “fire for effect” recovery experiment, I selected her backed up Music folder, then at the bottom of the Recovery Point Browser window I clicked on the Recover Files button, and Ghost churned away for several minutes and perfectly recovered all of my wife’s music folders and MP3 data files, album art, etc. onto her new PC’s hard drive. I then simply repeated the same process steps for the photos and documents, etc. For me, the most amazing recovery activity was when I located her backed up Outlook email folder/files. I was looking for perhaps two or three .pst files along with maybe a small .dat file, but I saw only one large .pst file. So, I selected it and clicked the Recover Files button and closed my eyes and crossed my fingers...over the next several minutes Ghost proceeded to completely and perfectly restore 10 years of emails; recreated and populated all of the various personal email folders; and it fully recreated her Contacts folder as well, all ingeniously accomplished by me “expertly” clicking on the Recover Files button – amazing! I also recovered all of the programs we wanted, IE favorites, and the list goes on. So, my personal crisis experience with Ghost 15 has been absolutely superb and totally successful!
Since my 30-day trial period for Ghost 15 was drawing to a close, I installed Symantec System Recovery on her PC this weekend. The nicest feature I’ve found so far about SSR, is that it recognizes and fully uses her new 3TB Toshiba external HDD as the backup drive, whose capacity is a better match for her PC's 2TB hard drive. Long time Ghost users will find SSR to be nearly identical to using Ghost. In fact, I’ve renamed the SSR shortcut on her desktop to "Ghost 16"...because I believe it is.
In closing, I want to recognize and thank the following forum members for their expert help, both in direct response to my confusing posts and also for their many other helpful Ghost-related posts throughout the long history of this great forum thread: AllenM, Brian_K, DaveH, dickevans, DStain, and redk9258