I'm been looking at all the poor reviews of Symantecs Ghost 9 and
am wondering if the people using the software are just inexperienced
Nope, I've been using imagers since before Symantec even bought Ghost
and have used all the majors, and some like Drive Image and Ghost for years.
or there is indeed something wrong with the software ?
Yes, real downsides with Ghost 9, by design basically.
You cant boot the CD and create images, you have to install it
before you can create images. Thats not desirable at all if you
want to do a safety image of a system before you do any work on it.
It has no decent way of cloning a drive. In spades with the
usual situation where the clone is bigger than the original,
when the boot drive is being replaced with a bigger drive.
Obscene if you have more than one partition on the drive and
want to adjust the partition sizes yourself for the new drive.
And since its done at the Win level, the partititon lettering
ends up in one hell of a mess. And it failed to clone one of
my partitions, basically crashed when doing that, and it took
as long to clone a single partition as True Image took to
clone the entire physical drive. Wota dog.
I have ghost 2003 and its great and would like the feature of
version 9 so I don't have to reboot my computer to image XP.
Yeah, thats the main advantage. Makes for MUCH better
support for imaging over the lan too since what is visible at
the Win level drive wise is automatically visible when creating
images and restoring. Tho it has problems just browsing the
lan if all the PCs arent in the WORKGROUP workgroup.
And incremental backups are the main thing added to 2003 too.
I currently much prefer Acronis True Image over Ghost 9.
