Group test: Symantec Norton Save & Restore

Symantec is a well-established software company with a wide range of products and Norton Ghost, a disk-imaging product now up to version 10.0, has been part of its range for some time.

Norton Save & Restore 2006 is a new product based largely on Ghost technology. Compared to Ghost 10, the new features offered by Save and Restore are: specific file and folder backup, group backup by file type, integration of the Norton Protection Centre console and the ability to trigger a backup from Norton Internet Security 2006 virus or worm outbreak notifications.

Generally Symantec products all have a cosmetically polished presentation and user interface. Norton Save & Restore is no exception, although installation turns out to be a bit of a minefield.

The start-up splash screen from the product CD offers a choice of Install, Driver validation, Update locator, Read me, or Watch a product tour. The first and the last two options are fairly self evident.

Driver validation checks to see if the device drivers present within the recovery OS are sufficient to operate the essential device services required during recovery (during system recovery Save & Restore loads and runs within its own operating system). Update locator searches for any Norton anti-virus definitions present on your disk and saves them to a desktop folder.

During installation a message appears recommending that you first test the ‘Symantec Recovery Environment’ by booting from the product CD, in effect dry-running the system recovery procedure.

You are advised to refer to ‘the online help file’ for more information, but, since the product, including the online help, has yet to be installed, this isn’t possible. Exploring the CD doesn’t reveal any obvious help on this issue. During the install procedure an option is displayed to run the driver validation, which does test the recovery environment.

Although obviously dependent on your system specification, booting system recovery from the CD is a fairly slow process that can take several minutes. As the recovery environment boots, a brief message is displayed advising you to press F6 to install any SCSI, Raid or Sata drivers required. Just as with an original Windows install, these will need to be on floppy disk and hence your system must include a floppy drive in this case.

Eventually you are presented with a user licence agreement screen which bears the warning ‘This software contains a Microsoft security feature that will cause your system to reboot, without prior notification, after 24 hours of continuous use’. This refers to the recovery environment, not the software, but it’s not clear and the hard-copy manual mentions none of this in the section covering installation.

Installation requires activation which generates a further product key. This is needed for any future installs and you’re encouraged to create a Norton account and register the product. It’s all a bit of a nuisance when all you want to do is get up and running.

Rather than provide direct access to all its controls through its menu structure, Norton Save & Restore makes extensive use of wizards, with hidden controls that only appear when needed.

While obviously intended to help the user, in practice this can be unsettling and makes it difficult to grasp the overall architecture of the program. This is a common mistake when wizards are implemented without providing an alternative route to perform the same tasks.

This article is part of a group test drive-imaging software.
See also:
Acronis True Image 10 Home
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8
R-Tools R-Drive Image 3.0
Runtime Software Drive Image XML

Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf download above.