I was pretty happy with Norton Ghost (NG) for these last few months. It was backing up reliably and I used it on a couple of occasions to recover a mangled project file. That was until I went to cleanup my backup destination. Keep in mind for this discussion that my backup destination is an internal 0.5 TB hard drive along with an 1.0 TB NAS (network accessible storage) as my offside destination.
I started the cleanup process by using NG's Manage Backup Destination's copy function to copy the older recovery points to USB attached removable hard drives. The problem with using NG to copy the recovery points is that NG decides that it needs to manage the removable hard drives and removable drives are no longer removable. When you click the remove hardware icon in the system tray and select the drive, Windows returns a message stating the drive is still in use. The only way to safely remove the drive is to power down the machine. I was willing to put up with this since I did figure out a work around although it still required powering down the machine. I figured this was OK mostly because I wouldn't have to do it often.
I then went to clean up my backup destination by selecting the oldest recovery points and deleting them. Everything appeared to be OK and so I let the normal scheduled backups run during the night. This morning, I checked my NAS and all the recovery points that I removed from my backup destination were also removed from my NAS. In other words, removing a recovery point from the backup destination will cause NG to automatically remove the same recovery point from any attached offsite copy destination. I did not accidentally remove the copies from the NAS because NG's Manage Backup Destination dialog cannot see the NAS (it is accessed through a network path). This second issue really puts me off. NG should not be removing offsite recovery points unless directed to. Backups are not just for when something bad happens, they are an important archival tool. This is why I am abandoning Norton Ghost.
It seems to me that if NG was little less dumbed up and included a couple of configuration options, a lot of this can be avoided.