Norton Ghost
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Norton Ghost v15 home screen
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| Original author(s) | Murray Haszard | ||||
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| Developer(s) | Symantec | ||||
| Initial release | 1995 | ||||
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| Type | Disk cloning | ||||
| License | Trialware | ||||
| Website | ghost |
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| Consumer | 15.0.1.36526 / April 1, 2010 |
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| Enterprise | 12.0.0.10531 / July 19, 2017 |
Ghost (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer) is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec.
The backup and recovery functionality has been replaced by Symantec System Recovery (SSR), although the Ghost imaging technology is still actively developed and is available as part of Symantec Ghost Solution Suite.
Binary Research developed Ghost in Auckland, New Zealand. After the Symantec acquisition, a few functions (such as translation into other languages) were moved elsewhere, but the main development remained in Auckland until October 2009 at which time much was moved to India.
Technologies developed by 20/20 Software were integrated into Ghost after their acquisition by Symantec in April 2000.
At the end of 2003, Symantec acquired its largest competitor in the disk-cloning field,PowerQuest. On August 2, 2004, Norton Ghost 9.0 was released as a new consumer version of Ghost, which is based on PowerQuest′s Drive Image version 7, and provides Live imaging of a Windows system. Ghost 9 continues to leverage the PowerQuest file format, meaning it is not backward compatible with previous versions of Ghost. However, a version of Ghost 8.0 is included on the Ghost 9 recovery disk to support existing Ghost customers.
The first versions of Ghost supports only the cloning of entire disks. However, version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individual partitions. Ghost could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file. Ghost allows for writing a clone or image to a second disk in the same machine, another machine linked by a parallel or network cable, a network drive, or to a tape drive.
Version 4.0 of Ghost added multicast technology, following the lead of a competitor, ImageCast. Multicasting supports sending a single backup image simultaneously to other machines without putting greater stress on the network than by sending an image to a single machine. This version also introduced Ghost Explorer, a Windows program which supports browsing the contents of an image file and extract individual files from it. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to support to adding and deleting files in an image with FAT, and later with ext2, ext3 and NTFS file systems. Until 2007, Ghost Explorer could not edit NTFS images. Ghost Explorer could work with images from older versions but only slowly; version 4 images contain indexes to find files rapidly. Version 4.0 also moved from real-mode DOS to 286 protected mode. The additional memory available allows Ghost to provide several levels of compression for images, and to provide the file browser. In 1998, Ghost 4.1 supports password-protected images.
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