Norton Ghost

Old Nerd said:

Sorry guys if I opened up a can of 'warm worms'. Meant no harm in asking about Norton Ghost but it seems to be a hotbed of distaste to some.

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Absolutely no need for apologies. Truth will out, especially when others are attempting to spuriously defend the indefensible ... or maybe just trolling

In that case, more fool us for biting ....

I really like what Ghost has become (System Recovery, Desktop Edition). My one problem is that the recovery media does NOT scale for different display resolutions and is completely unusable at some screen geometries. For example, on a 15.6" laptop screen with a 4K resolution it is totally unusable.

I had a support case open with Veritas for several years (literally). Every couple of weeks Veritas would provide new test versions. I finally gave up about a month or two ago and closed that support case, unresolved.

Their developers are absolute morons. The manner in which they were trying to fix it was so stupid that it stunned me that these people had jobs as developers.

YEARS! I've never experienced anything like that. My licenses to the product expires in October. I've been a licensed user since the early Ghost days renewing maintenance every year for probably at least 2 decades now, maybe even a lot longer

On a more positive note, here is another alternative to Reflect that I like.


The one thing that held this back was no support for volumes with BitLocker, but they finally resolved that in this latest major release.

TechnoMage2021 said:

If you liked the simplicity of Ghost, you'll love what "Broadcom" has done with it.

They took the last DOS version of Ghost, "Ghost 11.5" and added it to a Windows 10 Shell, and set it up on a Bootable ISO which you can burn to either a Flash Drive or CD. I have it on both.
I use it from a Flash Drive, almost daily among my ten PC's.

I just stumbled onto it one day while surfing the web. If you want a link to the download, PM me.
TM

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I too have been using the DOS version of Ghost since the 90's. On a floppy disk, on a cd, now on usb. Works for me

DennisG said:

I too have been using the DOS version of Ghost since the 90's. On a floppy disk, on a cd, now on usb. Works for me

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Atta Boy!
The original Ghost, DOS version, was so far ahead of the old MS Backup, that I couldn't even believe it was created on the planet Earth.
I did it!

After Symantec bought it, they tried to "Improve" it, by making it work from within Windows. If anyone says "it didn't work for me" I just wonder if it were not that Windows version that they are referring to. ??? I tried that version, of course, and found it full of pitfalls, and went right back to the older and 100% reliable DOS version. I still have that DOS version, on Floppy Disk, SD Memory Card, CD, and finally a Flash Drive, which I use today. (Actually, multiple Flash Drives, with both the DOS version, and the Broadcom version)
* The only thing that Symantec did to the old DOS version of Ghost, to make it better, was to make it compatible with NTFS formats. Since then Ghost 11.5 has been the favored version, for myself and many old Ghost users.

One huge problem with the Windows version, was, "How can you do a Ghost Restore from Windows, when the HD has gone up in Smoke?"
You still need the Restore program on some boot-able media, so you can restore to a Blank HD/SSD. I never liked that option.
Over the years, I've dealt with that scenario several times.

One little addition to Ghost is the "Ghost Explorer" program. It runs within Windows, and allows me to find a file in an old Ghost Backup Image, and restore it. I've only used that a couple of times, over the years, but it's really neat, when I've needed to restore just one file, that has gotten corrupted or lost.

I'm done here.
Y'all have a great 2024,
TM