Norton Save and Restore V2.0

List Price: $49.99 Discount Price: $14.95

Features:

• Restore instantly from system failures
• Easy-to-use wizards help novice users configure their systems to run in the background
• Integrates set-and-forget tools for automatic one-touch backups
• Safeguards photos and other important files

Customer Reviews:

Does what I want it too. [Posted on 2007-11-15]
I have two LAN connected PC's and backup critical data frequently. My goal was to purchase a software package that would allow me to backup the entire contents of both PC's to an external USB hard drive. This capability would enable me to restore either individual files or the entire contents of either PC in the event of loss of an internal hard drive or a file corruption problem.

My research of backup software packages found that most were extremely expensive and did far more than the actual backup and restore capability that I needed. The one exception was Norton's Save and Restore program. I downloaded the 30-day trial version and installed it on both PC's.

Norton's Save and Restore package is highly configurable and enabled me to save full images of the C: (current software and data) and D: (original PC software) drives to the external drive. Additionally, the package allows me to select specific directories (e.g. My Documents, Desktop, etc) that can also be included in the backup. Various frequency-of-backup options are supported including daily, weekly, and monthly backups. I have configured the application on both PCs to do complete backups on a weekly basis and backups of the My Documents directory on a daily basis.

The package also provides support for a wide variety of backup destinations including USB External Hard Drives, CD, and DVD devices. I have been using an External 500GB USB drive for backups. The backups occur transparently on both PC's as long as Windows NT is available on both systems. (Norton Save and Restore also supports other Windows platforms including Vista.) The only manual operation I perform is to occasionally check to ensure that the backups took place successfully. Norton provides extensive status information both in graphical format and old fashion log files for you to check.

The only disappointment I experienced was that I could not backup both PC's from a Save and Restore program located on one PC. Two separate versions of the program are required to backup the two PC's. All things considered this is a minor problem. Given the cost of a single copy, even the purchase of two copies is considerably cheaper than most of the other packages available.

I recommend consideration of this package to anyone interested in simply backing up and restoring data without a lot of extra bells and whistles.

Disk-to-Disk Backup useless [Posted on 2007-12-06]
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.

Don't Waste Your Time [Posted on 2008-04-10]
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!

Image Backup thats Simple and Works [Posted on 2008-05-12]
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.

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