I just wrote the following to Symantec feedback and whilst it may not change anything, I am posting here for users who may consider installing... be warned.
" To put it plainly, the installation of Norton GoBack (as bundled with Norton SystemWorks) is an absolute nightmare. I believe what I have had to be a fairly common user experience, based on the information I have found posted in many forums, and I don't think Symantec should allow this kind of issues to make it to a Production software.
My history:
1. Upgrade NIS 2005 to NIS 2006 -> perfect.
2. Follow suggestion by Symantec NIS and install NSW 2006 Basic Edition: install ran for about 4-5 hours, and finally failed indicating too much disk activity.
3. Started investigating, and discovered it is best to close all running programs and kill non essential processes to install
4. Restart PC, disconnect network, close all programs and processes -> same result as point 3 after another 4-5 hours.
5. Repeated the process -> same result
6. At this stage I had already spent in excess of 15 hours trying to install NSW.
7. Contact Tech Support by chat -> recommendation to uninstall NIS 2006 and rest of products with the Removal Tool and restart.
8. Following Tech Support advice, perform the steps outlines in point 7 -> result: took at least 4 hours and many reboots to get the computer back in a working state and with NIS 2006 working again.
9. Start investigation again
10. Start XP with a basic clean boot as recommended in another knowledge base page -> install fails after many hours still due to excessive disk activity!!!!!
11. Start XP with a complete clean boot (only Microsoft essential services) and this time the install hasn't failed, but has been going for over 16 hours and no sign it is going to complete soon!!!!!
Suggestions:
- improve the pre-install scan to check for number & type of running services, and give appropriate feedback to user before starting.
- include an option to cancel installation & rollback without having to wait 5 hours (or 16 in my case)
- change the message at the beginning that indicates the install may take 30 minutes to a message to say install may take 24 hours
- collect all the information provided in the knowledge base around these issues and include them in the release notes, so the user can have all the information at hand
- Place a warning that this install is for expert users only!!!
- If what the program does is a defrag or scan of the disk during so many hours, this could be made faster by some pre-emptive defragmentation maybe... if the user were made aware...
I can tell you my PC is up to date, always running the latest security patches / drivers, etc. and there is ample disk space (60GB disk with 17 GB free). To make the install shorter, I switched off two external disks I have (not recommended by Norton either, but just common sense, since the install seems to struggle with only one disk!!) and I am very computer-savvy. And with all I have mentioned, I consider this to be the worst install I have ever seen. During the same time, I installed many other programs on another PC and ran the complete upgrade to XP SP2 including download time, and NSW still hadn't finished on the first PC!!!
I sincerely hope you take some serious steps to improve this software or at least the way it installs. I have performed Production rollouts in a major Telecom operator with complete CRM & Billing systems in a shorter time than this!!
Best regards
" To put it plainly, the installation of Norton GoBack (as bundled with Norton SystemWorks) is an absolute nightmare. I believe what I have had to be a fairly common user experience, based on the information I have found posted in many forums, and I don't think Symantec should allow this kind of issues to make it to a Production software.
My history:
1. Upgrade NIS 2005 to NIS 2006 -> perfect.
2. Follow suggestion by Symantec NIS and install NSW 2006 Basic Edition: install ran for about 4-5 hours, and finally failed indicating too much disk activity.
3. Started investigating, and discovered it is best to close all running programs and kill non essential processes to install
4. Restart PC, disconnect network, close all programs and processes -> same result as point 3 after another 4-5 hours.
5. Repeated the process -> same result
6. At this stage I had already spent in excess of 15 hours trying to install NSW.
7. Contact Tech Support by chat -> recommendation to uninstall NIS 2006 and rest of products with the Removal Tool and restart.
8. Following Tech Support advice, perform the steps outlines in point 7 -> result: took at least 4 hours and many reboots to get the computer back in a working state and with NIS 2006 working again.
9. Start investigation again
10. Start XP with a basic clean boot as recommended in another knowledge base page -> install fails after many hours still due to excessive disk activity!!!!!
11. Start XP with a complete clean boot (only Microsoft essential services) and this time the install hasn't failed, but has been going for over 16 hours and no sign it is going to complete soon!!!!!
Suggestions:
- improve the pre-install scan to check for number & type of running services, and give appropriate feedback to user before starting.
- include an option to cancel installation & rollback without having to wait 5 hours (or 16 in my case)
- change the message at the beginning that indicates the install may take 30 minutes to a message to say install may take 24 hours
- collect all the information provided in the knowledge base around these issues and include them in the release notes, so the user can have all the information at hand
- Place a warning that this install is for expert users only!!!
- If what the program does is a defrag or scan of the disk during so many hours, this could be made faster by some pre-emptive defragmentation maybe... if the user were made aware...
I can tell you my PC is up to date, always running the latest security patches / drivers, etc. and there is ample disk space (60GB disk with 17 GB free). To make the install shorter, I switched off two external disks I have (not recommended by Norton either, but just common sense, since the install seems to struggle with only one disk!!) and I am very computer-savvy. And with all I have mentioned, I consider this to be the worst install I have ever seen. During the same time, I installed many other programs on another PC and ran the complete upgrade to XP SP2 including download time, and NSW still hadn't finished on the first PC!!!
I sincerely hope you take some serious steps to improve this software or at least the way it installs. I have performed Production rollouts in a major Telecom operator with complete CRM & Billing systems in a shorter time than this!!
Best regards