I'm considering buying Norton Ghost. Before I do that I want to ask questions of a real person, I don't want to squeeze abbreviated questions in a tiny text-entry box and then wait overnight for an answer. Is there a phone number I can call to talk to a human about product features before I give my money to Norton? Seems reasonable to me.
Software manufacturers seem to expect that potential customers will buy products without any more than stilted electronic contact. And I prefer talking to someone who speaks very clear English - hopefully his first language. I don't like to keep asking: "Huh? What did you say?" because the rep's accent is so thick and his speech so fast that I start wondering how interested the company is in attracting potential clients. Let's show some class Norton. Talk to us pre-sales people. Get us interested. Sell us on your product. Stop being so interested in saving money by giving us mediocre support... PRE-sales support at that!
I have two drives, neither are small. Can I save images of them using the base Ghost product, or Is there a default size limit after which I pay for additional space?
Does the image facility take a snapshot of the entire drive(s) so that I can simply restore from the stored images and reboot - with all my data intact? Hardly seems possible.
Must I individually specify the folders and files for which I want to save backup images?
I have two drives, neither are small. Can I save images of them using the base Ghost product, or Is there a default size limit after which I pay for additional space?
As long as you have the space on another drive, Ghost should not have any problems backing up your drives or more accurately partitions. Ghost does not use online space that you pay for, that is another product called Norton Online Backup. Ghost needs hard drive space to save your images to. So for example you have a hard drive that has 2 partitions.. C: and D: and they each have 25GB of data, your target drive should have at least 50GB of room. More is better though. Ghost compresses the files in the image. How effective the compression is depends on what types of files are on your drive. A lot of text files will compress to about 50%. A partition full of mpg, mp3, zip, etc. will not achieve much compression because they are already compressed.
Does the image facility take a snapshot of the entire drive(s) so that I can simply restore from the stored images and reboot - with all my data intact? Yes. Hardly seems possible. That's what drive imaging is all about. It has improved from years ago when you had to shut down and run the backup from DOS. Now you can do "hot" backups while Windows is running. One of Ghost's best features is incremental backups. Once you have the initial Recovery point, Ghost can save just the changes that have occurred. This greatly saves disk space. The incrementals are not stand alone files and depend on the previous file. I personally start a new recovery point set once a month and do an incremental backup every night.
Must I individually specify the folders and files for which I want to save backup images?
Ghost has two backup methods. One is partition imaging (also called Recovery Points). Almost everything* on the drive is captured. It is what Ghost does best. Most of the people here use it and not the next method.
The next method Ghost uses is File and Folder Backup. As the name suggests, you specify the files / folders you want backed up. Most of the people here do not care for that method because when you have a valid image, F&F Backup is redundant. It is actually easier to restore files from an image then F&F Backup. Have a look at THIS THREAD by Allen M.
Oh, I forgot to mention, Ghost 15 also has the ability to boot into the SRD (Symantec Recovery disc) and you can run a cold backup from there. This is handy if your OS won't boot and you want to backup your files before reinstalling Windows, etc. By running a cold backup, you save every file on the disk partition.
I'm considering buying Norton Ghost. Before I do that I want to ask questions of a real person, I don't want to squeeze abbreviated questions in a tiny text-entry box and then wait overnight for an answer. Is there a phone number I can call to talk to a human about product features before I give my money to Norton? Seems reasonable to me.
Software manufacturers seem to expect that potential customers will buy products without any more than stilted electronic contact. And I prefer talking to someone who speaks very clear English - hopefully his first language. I don't like to keep asking: "Huh? What did you say?" because the rep's accent is so thick and his speech so fast that I start wondering how interested the company is in attracting potential clients. Let's show some class Norton. Talk to us pre-sales people. Get us interested. Sell us on your product. Stop being so interested in saving money by giving us mediocre support... PRE-sales support at that!