Norton Ghost 15 is dire
I have been imaging hard drives over the network as part of my working life for more years than I care to remember, this has involved mostly using Altiris' RDeploy tools but also occasionally Ghost and Disk copy and some Paragon tools. Things can wrong if you don't pay attention, I remmber once dropping a DOS image on to our Exchange Mailbox server rather than taking an image of it for DR testing, oh how we laughed, fortunately it was just teh system drive so was quite easy to fix.
However after a recent purchase of some Samsung SSDs I had occasion to investigate am recent copy of Ghost 15. Oh dear what were they thinking, or perhaps they weren't.
Symantec seem to be making one mistake after the other of late, every major release of software seems to be changed beyond all recognition and useabilty, Altiris 7/7.1, Backup Exec 2012 and now Ghost.
Disk imaging should be simple, put a bootable CD/USB drive in, boot to it say copy this disk to this disk and job done. That is how you used to do it in the older version, Not anymore.
I scanned the application for the word Clone or disk copy and it was no where to be found, lots of mentions of backing up partitions and SRPs creating restore points and such like but no simple cloning. A quick trip to the Symantec website (never a joyful experience) and the forums has a few lost souls in the same boot and a number of not very clear or helpful answers as to how one should go about this simple task.
So there you have it, Symantec have once again tried to make a product more usable and stuffed up completly and made it unusable instead.
Oh and by the way don't use the product that come in the box as it doesn't work you will need at least SP1 apparently, another trait of recent Symantec software, they get it rushed out the door to hit a deadline but it doesn't actually work or basic features are missing until they release an update, Altiris 7 had no Network booting (PXE) support so you couldn't do imaging over the network, that came in 7.1, just about. We are looking to stop using Altiris at work now and stump up the cash to move to Landesk because Altiris 7 is so difficult to use, it has always been flaky (6.9 SP5 has WOL issues across subnets, every update broke the remote control and needed a hot fix) but at least it was relatively simple to use.
It's about time heads at the top of Symantec rolled because something is seriously broken on their product development side whether it is the people or the way the do things it is simple appalling and needs to be fixed soon or they will suffer.
However after a recent purchase of some Samsung SSDs I had occasion to investigate am recent copy of Ghost 15. Oh dear what were they thinking, or perhaps they weren't.
Symantec seem to be making one mistake after the other of late, every major release of software seems to be changed beyond all recognition and useabilty, Altiris 7/7.1, Backup Exec 2012 and now Ghost.
Disk imaging should be simple, put a bootable CD/USB drive in, boot to it say copy this disk to this disk and job done. That is how you used to do it in the older version, Not anymore.
I scanned the application for the word Clone or disk copy and it was no where to be found, lots of mentions of backing up partitions and SRPs creating restore points and such like but no simple cloning. A quick trip to the Symantec website (never a joyful experience) and the forums has a few lost souls in the same boot and a number of not very clear or helpful answers as to how one should go about this simple task.
So there you have it, Symantec have once again tried to make a product more usable and stuffed up completly and made it unusable instead.
Oh and by the way don't use the product that come in the box as it doesn't work you will need at least SP1 apparently, another trait of recent Symantec software, they get it rushed out the door to hit a deadline but it doesn't actually work or basic features are missing until they release an update, Altiris 7 had no Network booting (PXE) support so you couldn't do imaging over the network, that came in 7.1, just about. We are looking to stop using Altiris at work now and stump up the cash to move to Landesk because Altiris 7 is so difficult to use, it has always been flaky (6.9 SP5 has WOL issues across subnets, every update broke the remote control and needed a hot fix) but at least it was relatively simple to use.
It's about time heads at the top of Symantec rolled because something is seriously broken on their product development side whether it is the people or the way the do things it is simple appalling and needs to be fixed soon or they will suffer.
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