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Confirmed User
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 3,797
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Does a good back-up software even exist?
I'm looking for a good program to backup my entire hard drive. I have 2 internal harddrives on seperate IDE channels in my PC & intended to do regular backups but after reading horrible reviews of every single backup utility out there it certainly gives me pause. I'm backing up all my work on CD-R's now which is a bit of a pain in the ass. But, from reading user reviews on cnet, for example, it appears none of these backup utilities (even the widely used Norton Ghost) works correctly with Windows XP esp. with an NFTS (rather then FAT32) system. Half the users have horror stories for all these products. Ghost got better then most but not good enough for me to risk it based on some sample reviews I'm including. Does anyone know why this is & what's the best alternative? Here's some sample reviews that insure I will never even attempt to use these utilities:
"Piece of Junk" Anonymous on 27-Jan-2003 08:02:54 am
This software is painful to use and limited in features (particularly when dealing with NTFS). The backup via TCP/IP is a stupid joke. As far as I can tell, you can back up via TCP/IP only if the TCP/IP destination is using FAT disks! Additionally, the documentation is quite poor. After creating about 5 different flavors of boot disks, I give up.
"Absolute waste for XP and NTFS" Hate_symantec on 20-Apr-2002 05:42:17 pm
I have an XP Pro system and use NTFS. To make the DOS boot disk you use either PC-DOS (that comes with Ghost) or format /s a floppy on a Win9X system and use the MS-DOS based files to create the Ghost boot disk. However, if you boot using the DOS system on the floppies you can't see any NTFS drives or partitions so they can't be ghosted. I plan on giving my copy of the disk to someone who sells copies of software, hopefully then can sell a few thousand copies of this and screw Symantec.
Lost 25 gigs of data because ghost could not read what it had written. Formatted the hard drive then reinstalled. Ghost got stuck on disk 2 of 36. Switching from symantec on all products
DESTROYED*** MY PARTITIONS!!!" Very Dissatisfied on 23-Mar-2003 03:32:57 am
I had to reinstall my whole f*ing computer because the Ghost 2003 windows restore app rewrote over my existing partitions!!! Do not buy this product!!!
NO Firewire Support and not 100%25 reliable" Experienced User on 03-Jan-2003 05:22:49 am
The program contains bugs that can screw your whole computer (happened to me twice), then it does not work with firewire, techsupport sucks too. A backup software should be 100%25 reliable, and when firewire support is advertised then I expect it. Symantec used to have great products, but they really suck now. Norton Ut. is a joke, as well as the Cleansweep Suit, and Ghost since with Symantec sucks too.
On many different types of machines and many differnt instances on he same hardware I get "Enter the next disk in the span" when there is only one disk or "This disk was not created with Norton Ghost" when it as just created just a few minutes earlier. If you do use it check your image after you create it and turn off CRC checking in the "Options".
I have been a ghost user for years. This piece of beta-garbage is a disgrace to pawn off on gullible buyers. Luckily i got my money back, never to give symantec another dime. Cant even create a boot disk, takes down my aspi drivers(not even cd writing software does that)and the program cant even load a simple mouse driver in dos, that hasnt changed in years. BEWARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS IS NOT THE SAME COMPANY OF A FEW YEARS AGO, TELLING MY FRIENDS TO NOT BUY ANY OF THEIR PRODUCTS.
"Installed easily, reset machine, and then hung!" allreeds on 12-Nov-2002 11:02:56 am
I installed Ghost on my Toshiba laptop, it installed easily, and the wizard came up as expected. I entered the information hoping to clone the internal drive to a BUSLINK 80GB hard drive, and then GHOST it over to my new laptop's hard drive. After installation, I followed the directions, and entered the required information. The souce laptop reset itself, and then came up with the message: Operating System Missing_ I couldn't go to BIOS, or get my laptop to read the CD/ROM drive to use my recover disks, or anything else. All I got was that same message. When I tried F8, or Esc or CTRL, I got press F1 for default setting. I did so , and still got the same message about the operating system missing. As it stands now, I will probably have to replace the internal drive in my original laptop, as I can't seem to access any of the data from the original drive. Any ideas??
"Ghost trashed my server" Manfred on 12-Oct-2002 03:02:55 pm
Ghost is responsible for one of my worst experiences in my professional carreer: though it works on "simple" hardware configurations ok - it does not work on raid arrays. After a server repair I "ghosted" the system drive onto a newly installed drive. Ghost did not write the image to the drive selected, but trashed a different drive instead. There was no warning, no hint, nothing - it just wrote the image somewhere. I took me one day and one night to repair and restore the database it had trashed. I will never touch it again in my life.
"Totally useless" XP developer on 24-May-2002 07:02:15 am
Remember MS-DOS? Remember the old, clunky, hard-to-use, buggy programs we used to use? Well, Norton/Symantec is still selling one of them: Ghost. With this program, you use a Windows GUI program to prepare a boot floppy; you then reboot your machine, and do the backup in DOS mode. Bad interface, and you can't do anything else at the same time. Also, say you've bought two hard drives: one for use, the other for a bit-perfect image backup. This is what Ghost is mainly meant to do. Except: in the DOS interface, your drives don't have their usual letter (C designations; they're numbered (and no, C: isn't 1 like you'd expect). You can't backup by drive letter, or by drive label; only by number. You have no chance to double check your selection before starting the backup; and of course, if you get it wrong, you've just trashed your ENTIRE hard disk! The marketing blurb for the product also says you can backup your hard drive to a CD writer. Well, you can't; unless you have a hard disk that's less than a CD can hold (700 megabytes). Remember way back when hard drives were that tiny? So: the only feature that works has a 50%25 chance of trashing your data instead of backing it up. Boy, I'm glad I spent my money on THIS product.
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