I have worked with Ghost exclusively under XP. There are my experiences, particularly with regard to the reliability of the backup and restoration of backups, basically very positive. And that's the reason that I also advocated a the "Ghost", even if it is not my only and not primarily occupied my backup program.
The by another reviewer remarked system slowdowns I can not confirm. The program works rather quickly and even with my new PC along with almost the entire hardware. However, there is an interplay with external SATA disks via the eSATA cable problems.
What I do not find so great:
- Backup option via inlaid Start CD is missing, in fact - just for a "security software" company peculiar.
- I find the handling not as intuitive as accessible in some other vendors. You can tell that the Ghost was long gone really fundamentally revised here.
- Unlike other products, I have found no way to recover individual files from a partition backup (as opposed of course to a file backup). Should I see nothing here that is in practice for me a serious drawback - because ultimately you need then, to be sure, go two backup strategies in parallel.
Conclusion: safe and reliable, but not really comfortable. And, as unfortunately with other Symantec products, for the more experienced computer users little too patronizing, with too little fine-tuning options. Thus the possibility of the casual user is indeed taken to make mistakes - but the program is also less accessible than its competitors.
Norton Ghost 14.0 is indeed compatible with Vista (I've skipped), but not with Windows 7 - which is why it is currently offered very reasonably priced. Announced is the version 15.0, which is then run with Win 7. Norton Ghost 14.0-owners should be able to upgrade, on what terms, is Symantec not yet know about.
