Customer Rating:  
Summary: Looks great as advertised, performs really poorly in practice!
Comment: (This is my first fully negative review of software. Normally I wouldn't bother anyone...)
Like most users, by the time you've bought a Vista backup program you already experienced or dealt with issues and solved a large number of them. I'm no different in that repect; my expectations are low so that I'm never disappointed. Well, I'm more than disappointed in S&R 2.
1 - My latest experience with my supposedly automated weekly backup to a 320 GB USB2 drive is fairly typical. Details vary from week to week, but the outcome is the roughly the same: I sat through THREE of these sessions last night to get a "routine" weekly incremental (it's not) backup to work. While reading a novel and supervising it, it took 90-120 minutes to back up less than 100 GB of information: it works for 90%-95% of the time, stops, and then says it cannot continue. Exit, and then coldboot or warmboot (your pick). No explaination other than "cannot access the target drive". I can see the drive, and copy files from the drive to test it, but S&R cannot find it. Try again and it works on the n+1 time. (n varies from week to week but was n=2 last night.)
2 - The welcome screen says that no recovery points have been created for my drive (C:) despite the fact that I can click on my target USB drive and see the dated files made by S&R. Better yet, when I go into other screens in S&R to manage previous backup recovery points, it can see them and work accordingly.
3 - The fine tuning elements for automatically deleting old recovery points also do not seem work. But then again, what do you expect for software that can't complete even its primary task.
4 - Technical support? What's that? I've already updated drivers, uninstalled and re-installed S&R2 several time, etc. See many other reviews on AMAZON.COM and CNET.COM. Even the best reviews (more than 1 star) say that the phone staff act like they haven't even seen the software.
DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY AND (LOTS OF) TIME EVEN THOUGH THE PACKAGE LOOKS GOOD, LIKE I DID.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Destined to be shelfware
Comment: What good can I say about this product? They really screwed up everything that could be screwed up. The interface is cluttered. Options that should be together are spread throughout the program. It won't back up a network-attached drive, which makes it pretty close to worthless for people with home networks.
If you want to cherry pick your backups, you might expect a tree view where you could click all the folders you want to back up. Sorry. You pick them through a chooser, and it is a real pain. Who thought of this?!
It also mysteriously takes forever on occasion. No, it's not a full backup that is the reason. It sometimes compares the system to an incremental to begin the incremental, and that can take longer than a full backup. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, you might as well do a full.
If you change drive letters on a drive, it stupidly can't figure out how to do the backups, and you can't just provide a new drive letter. The solution is to start the backups from scratch, near as I can tell.
It is really fast for drive-to-drive copying...but it fails 100% of the time for me. After 99% is finished, it always complains about a sector allocation (on a verified good drive) and dies.
I've had it with Symantec. Everything I've bought from them in the last few years is on the shelf. No more.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Image Backup thats Simple and Works
Comment: I use Save & Restore 2.0 (and before that V1.0).
When my system got corrupted after installing MS trial software (and MS tech support was unable to resolve the issue) I was able to quickly restore my system (Vista OS) with Norton's Save & Restore 2.0 and the CD boot disk that comes with the software.
Users need to realize that this is an image program. It creates a compressed image of your hard disk and does incremental updates of the original image. You can restore it to another hard drive from the bakup HD but you can't simply plug the external harddrive in and expect to use it from the backup harddrive. The software is not designed for this.
If you want to do this you need software such as CMS's Bouncback Professional, which maintains an uncompressed copy of your HD that can be used a boot drive.
That said, Save & Restore is simple and works. It does what it says it does. More importantly, since it stores a compress image it allows me to keep 5 copes of my system (covering 5 weeks) on a single external HD.
I recommend that one use at least two backup solutions and a UPS. I use Save & Restore (to an external Seagate USB HD), Mozy; an online service, and a APC UPS to filter the power and provide protection against power surges. Additionally, I copy important files to a CD monthly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Time
Comment: Look, this is a waste of your time. Indian support which gives you no answers. Ran for 48 hours and failed three times. It just doesn't work. If you want something that works and has great support look for NovaBACKUP. These guys really work with you and make sure the product does what it claims. It's the same price and 1000 times better.
I rely heavily on Reviews when I shop at Amazon, so wanted to be sure and make sure to warn people as well as recommend things as I buy them. Norton did give me a full re-fund but it cost me a week to get it back. Hope this helps...good luck!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Disk-to-Disk Backup useless
Comment: I wanted a simple way to clone my laptop drive to an external drive so that in the event of a failure, I could simply swap the drives. The software seemed to work just fine and gave no error messages. I swapped drives to test and guess what, I was unable to logon to Windows. It would prompt me for my password and then say "logging off". I have used shareware software that worked better, albiet slower. I would not recommend this software for anyone looking to perform full didsk-to-disk backups.
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