Bad... very,

     I have been a contented user of Norton Ghost for maybe a dozen versions until a few months ago when Symantec announced they would be discontinuing support for it. I of course went out and got a copy of Symantec System Recovery 2013 (SSR) 2013 so I could be ahead of the curve. That's when the trouble started.SSR installed fine. It even seemed to back up my disk drives as expected. However, backup software is only as good as its ability to restore. I tried to do a full restore (to a different disk... I wasn't born yesterday), it failed because I needed to have the software create a custom restore disk, and that didn't work. I figure that's no real problem as I can just uninstall SSR until Symantec resolves their issues and go back to Ghost.However, SSR refused to uninstall. That's when I reached out to Symantec technical support. After spending about 12 hours on the phone (over several days) with their senior technical support personnel controlling my...Read more

ADDENDUM:Now, after almost a year and TWO service packs, the product seems to be working. You can't get the software with the service packs already installed (as far as I've been able to determine). Downloading the service pack and installing it aren't enough. You also have to download the .ISO file and create a bootable CD for the restore portion. I have upgraded it from 2 stars to 3 stars.ORIGINAL REVIEW:I've used Norton Ghost for more than a decade. It's always been reliable for backups and emergency restores. Symantec System Recovery Desktop 2013 (SSRD2013) is the same thing as Norton Ghost, with the addition of Windows 8 compatibility and hardware independent restore. Unfortunately, they released it well before it was ready. I backed up my Windows 8 system successfully (uses UEFI instead of BIOS). But it refused to restore the backup image. It found the backup image, and displayed it as UEFI. When I booted the CD in UEFI mode and selected the...Read more