5 ms·

Norton Ghost discontinued

42 points by ruchirablog 13y ago

Gravityloss 13y ago
Thought this was a motorcycle...
noonespecial 13y ago
"And SSR said to bring many advantages suck as Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 , 64bit , UEFI secure boot support and USB recovery disk support." Dude, that's a hell of a typo. Umm.. I agree? Heh. Its a shame though. Man I loved Ghost back in the day. I remember that magic boot floppy and the double-headed LPT/Serial "ghost cable"(1). Good times. (1) Technically I think the cable came with an overpriced utility called "Laplink".
- christogreeff 13y ago
  Laplink. Now there's some memories right there. :)
  - ChrisClark 13y ago
    I think it came with a giant yellow parallel port cable, right?
    - onemorepassword 13y ago
      And a blue serial one. Or the other way around. Lacking networking it was the best/only way to pump data from one box to the other.
      - bphogan 13y ago
        The old DOS-based LapLink was awesome. I recovered many people's files with that when I was first learning how to do this whole computery thing.
  - guiambros 13y ago
    Ra, Laplink. That bring back some fond memories. Laplink, PC Tools, Norton Utilities. The basic kit of every "sysadmin" at the time...
- ruchirablog 13y ago
  OP here, Thanks for mentioning :) corrected the article
jamescun 13y ago
Shame, one of the few Symantec products that didn't come with an accompanying sigh with use. Can't say I'm surprised, iirc development was halted in 2010 with the firing/reallocation of the team behind it.
- Deinos 13y ago
  Couldn't agree more... the one product that wasn't inherently horrible...
jpdoctor 13y ago
Would love to hear ideas on the best replacement from other HNers.
- bryogenic 13y ago
  Clonezilla - http://clonezilla.org/ http://clonezilla.org/
- ValentineC 13y ago
  DriveImage XML (for Windows cloning) - http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
- jstanley 13y ago
  Not entirely sure what Ghost does, but... dd?
  - derekp7 13y ago
    Ghost is like dd, but with filesystem knowledge (i.e., so it won't dump block belonging to deleted files, and can restore do a different size disk). Somewhat like what dump/restore is on Unix file systems, but of course with Dos/Windows support.
    - chokolad 13y ago
      imagex from Windows AIK (or windows ADK if you want win 8 version)
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      >Ghost is like dd, but with Microsoft Windows filesystem knowledge, And limited or no support for other filesystems. It was very convenient if you were a MS-only, and could be troublesome if you tried to do anything fancy with another OS. In versions after 2003 Norton began adding some support for other filesystems.
- Ecio78 13y ago
  True Image is a good commercial alternative (now it's a full fledged suite of products)
ambrop7 13y ago
"It allows users to create a block level disk backups and restore it with ease" Nitpick: I distinctly remember Ghost having mentioned specific files while it was backing up or recovering, hence it's not (entirely) a block-level backup. Also it could detect free space on the filesystem and not put that in the image.
- joenathan 13y ago
  >Nitpick: I distinctly remember Ghost having mentioned specific files while it was backing up or recovering, hence it's not (entirely) a block-level backup. Also it could detect free space on the filesystem and not put that in the image. Block level backups are optional in Ghost, they take a longer time to do, and are less efficient, the option isn't enabled by default.
- nigel_bree 13y ago
  Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file format use for NTFS in .GHO containers wasn't a pure file archive as it was for FAT32. That original Ghost was developed in the mid-90's and purchased from Binary Research; development on that continued in Auckland until 2009 when everyone but myself and another engineer was laid off (he and I maintained the product and helped transition it to mothballed state, and then we were laid off mid-2010). PowerQuest's Drive Image product was block-level, and that's the product sold as "Norton Ghost" and which has been cancelled (although like Symantec Ghost, everyone who worked on it has long been laid off; both ended up in maintenance-only mode looked after by separate teams in Symantec's facility in Pune). Later on, "Norton 360" ended up with another separately acquired file-level backup product not related to either genuine Ghost or PowerQuest's product line (or any of the Veritas products either). Neither the corporate Symantec Ghost - genuine Ghost, ex Binary Research - nor the consumer Norton Ghost - ex-PQ evolved out of Drive Image - shared any code at all, except for a small DLL used to allow the Symantec Ghost product to read from V2i images created by the consumer product and treat them the same as VHD or VMDK files when we added support for using those. The branding confusion stems from when PowerQuest failed and was acquired by Symantec. One of the ex-PowerQuest managers was put in charge of not just the rump of PQ, but also PCAnywhere and genuine Ghost, and this resulted almost immediately in genuine Ghost (which made more net profit than PowerQuest had revenue) being cancelled in 2004, and most of the staff assigned to supporting PowerQuest's legacy Drive Image product or writing plug-ins for another acqusition done at the same time as PQ (On iCommand, later eventually withdrawn since it was unfit for sale). PowerQuest's V2i windows product, which included a volume snapshot driver for Windows 2000 source from StorageCraft (founded by ex-PowerQuest people), was rebranded and released as a consumer product called "Norton Ghost" version 9. The genuine Ghost product was at the time sold to consumers as Norton Ghost 2003, and to businesses as Symantec Ghost Enterprise Edition 8. The choice of "Norton Ghost 9" as the branding for the ex-PowerQuest product was done to position it as not just consumer but also as the successor to the genuine business product (despite it having none of the capabilities of that) to leverage off our brand, although what it mostly accomplished was to poison our brand and confuse our customers. [ Symantec Ghost 8 was rebranded with a minor update issued as "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v1" when development was cancelled and it went to maintenance-only; we put out an update by borrowing ahead on our maintenance budget to get out a 1.1 update to that, and then after the Veritas merger genuine Ghost was uncancelled. When the new Veritas managers took over supervising both our team and the ex-PQ one and saw that we still made substantially more money than they did, they unwound some of the changes made to kill out line of business - but not all, and from then on our funding was kept too low for us to advance the product rapidly and we were unable to replace staff. As a result although Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v2 and 2.5 eventually followed, in April 2009 we were just about to enter beta for 3.0 when the team was disbanded and the site closed.] Using the ex-PQ product as a consumer backup product was reasonable, as it was a dumb block-based product, but thanks to the storage driver they installed combined with VSS it had differentials, which genuine Ghost didn't. However, branding the consumer PQ product as Ghost was a disaster for the genuine Ghost product, both in terms of causing massive brand confusion, and thanks to the politics ensuring we never got properly funded from 2004 onwards. An interesting experiment came from later, post-Veritas attempts to reduce the costly damage to the Ghost brand that "Norton Ghost" was causing; the exact same consumer product was released as "Norton Save and Restore 1.0", with a decent marketing push. Exact same product, it sold about 1/10 as much without the "Ghost" brand. Although the business Symantec Ghost did many times the revenue of the PQ consumer "Norton Ghost", this was enough to ensure that the (deliberately created) branding confusion was never properly fixed.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Interesting story. So ghost has been around for a while, its a filesystem aware dump and restore utility. Its very useful and can do differential dumps. It no doubt needs relatively small amounts of development/support. One might guess this would be like 'free' money for a company like Semantic. And yet they can't recover the cost of an automated email support system and a fractional engineer. What does that say about their overhead as a software company? Google is (in)famous for 'support by peer group' types of things. Might work here. So this is a way in which open source can 'win' in the Windows world as well I think as a way of lowering costs and getting the fractional engineer out of the volunteers that maintain it and the perhaps run the faq. I find those to be interesting business questions.
- aperley 13y ago
  Supporting newer OSes (UEFI secure boot, Win8, etc.) requires more than a small amount of development, hence the move to Symantec's product.
- weej 13y ago
  It tells me that SYMANTEC is no longer making a decent enough profit margin to justify the operational and support systems expenses for the product. Google's support by peer group plays towards online tools and web services. If you've every done ANY large client-side, windows based software development while trying to support aging versions of OS and application distributions it is no SMALL task.
japaget 13y ago
I use Drive Snapshot, http://www.drivesnapshot.de http://www.drivesnapshot.de . Tweakhound recommends Acronis True Image, http://www.tweakhound.com/acronis-true-image/ http://www.tweakhound.com/acronis-true-image/ . I have noticed that Symantec (the owner of the Norton brand) often buys good software from other companies and after the acquisition the quality declines. Ghost was bought by Symantec from Binary Research, a New Zealand startup, in 1998.
derleth 13y ago
What's the advantage of Norton Ghost over rsync?
Selfcommit 13y ago
Another (And better) alternative.. http://www.fogproject.org http://www.fogproject.org
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  Elaborate on "better"?
  - Selfcommit 13y ago
    Free? (Does not make it better but it's a good start.) Some high points: -Records and inventories all systems it contacts -Has a windows client piece capable of domain joining/restarts/running 'snap-ins' or executables deployed from the FOG server up to 8M -Very supportive and helpful community
liveoneggs 13y ago
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
adyio 13y ago
Image for Windows is a good replacement. Also available for Linux. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm
jimueller 13y ago
I interpret that as Ghost is being renamed to SSR with a few new OSs supported.
gnarbarian 13y ago
It bugs me when someone uses software in a singular form: "Norton Ghost is a software which makes life easier" it reminds me of: "Kettle is a cookware for boiling water" It just seems strange to me.

42 points by ruchirablog 13y ago

Thought this was a motorcycle...

"And SSR said to bring many advantages suck as Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 , 64bit , UEFI secure boot support and USB recovery disk support." Dude, that's a hell of a typo. Umm.. I agree? Heh. Its a shame though. Man I loved Ghost back in the day. I remember that magic boot floppy and the double-headed LPT/Serial "ghost cable"(1). Good times. (1) Technically I think the cable came with an overpriced utility called "Laplink".

christogreeff 13y ago
Laplink. Now there's some memories right there. :)
- ChrisClark 13y ago
  I think it came with a giant yellow parallel port cable, right?
  - onemorepassword 13y ago
    And a blue serial one. Or the other way around. Lacking networking it was the best/only way to pump data from one box to the other.
    - bphogan 13y ago
      The old DOS-based LapLink was awesome. I recovered many people's files with that when I was first learning how to do this whole computery thing.
- guiambros 13y ago
  Ra, Laplink. That bring back some fond memories. Laplink, PC Tools, Norton Utilities. The basic kit of every "sysadmin" at the time...
ruchirablog 13y ago
OP here, Thanks for mentioning :) corrected the article

jamescun 13y ago

Shame, one of the few Symantec products that didn't come with an accompanying sigh with use. Can't say I'm surprised, iirc development was halted in 2010 with the firing/reallocation of the team behind it.

Deinos 13y ago
Couldn't agree more... the one product that wasn't inherently horrible...

jpdoctor 13y ago

Would love to hear ideas on the best replacement from other HNers.

bryogenic 13y ago
Clonezilla - http://clonezilla.org/ http://clonezilla.org/
ValentineC 13y ago
DriveImage XML (for Windows cloning) - http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
jstanley 13y ago
Not entirely sure what Ghost does, but... dd?
- derekp7 13y ago
  Ghost is like dd, but with filesystem knowledge (i.e., so it won't dump block belonging to deleted files, and can restore do a different size disk). Somewhat like what dump/restore is on Unix file systems, but of course with Dos/Windows support.
  - chokolad 13y ago
    imagex from Windows AIK (or windows ADK if you want win 8 version)
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    >Ghost is like dd, but with Microsoft Windows filesystem knowledge, And limited or no support for other filesystems. It was very convenient if you were a MS-only, and could be troublesome if you tried to do anything fancy with another OS. In versions after 2003 Norton began adding some support for other filesystems.
Ecio78 13y ago
True Image is a good commercial alternative (now it's a full fledged suite of products)

ambrop7 13y ago

"It allows users to create a block level disk backups and restore it with ease" Nitpick: I distinctly remember Ghost having mentioned specific files while it was backing up or recovering, hence it's not (entirely) a block-level backup. Also it could detect free space on the filesystem and not put that in the image.

joenathan 13y ago
>Nitpick: I distinctly remember Ghost having mentioned specific files while it was backing up or recovering, hence it's not (entirely) a block-level backup. Also it could detect free space on the filesystem and not put that in the image. Block level backups are optional in Ghost, they take a longer time to do, and are less efficient, the option isn't enabled by default.
nigel_bree 13y ago
Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file format use for NTFS in .GHO containers wasn't a pure file archive as it was for FAT32. That original Ghost was developed in the mid-90's and purchased from Binary Research; development on that continued in Auckland until 2009 when everyone but myself and another engineer was laid off (he and I maintained the product and helped transition it to mothballed state, and then we were laid off mid-2010). PowerQuest's Drive Image product was block-level, and that's the product sold as "Norton Ghost" and which has been cancelled (although like Symantec Ghost, everyone who worked on it has long been laid off; both ended up in maintenance-only mode looked after by separate teams in Symantec's facility in Pune). Later on, "Norton 360" ended up with another separately acquired file-level backup product not related to either genuine Ghost or PowerQuest's product line (or any of the Veritas products either). Neither the corporate Symantec Ghost - genuine Ghost, ex Binary Research - nor the consumer Norton Ghost - ex-PQ evolved out of Drive Image - shared any code at all, except for a small DLL used to allow the Symantec Ghost product to read from V2i images created by the consumer product and treat them the same as VHD or VMDK files when we added support for using those. The branding confusion stems from when PowerQuest failed and was acquired by Symantec. One of the ex-PowerQuest managers was put in charge of not just the rump of PQ, but also PCAnywhere and genuine Ghost, and this resulted almost immediately in genuine Ghost (which made more net profit than PowerQuest had revenue) being cancelled in 2004, and most of the staff assigned to supporting PowerQuest's legacy Drive Image product or writing plug-ins for another acqusition done at the same time as PQ (On iCommand, later eventually withdrawn since it was unfit for sale). PowerQuest's V2i windows product, which included a volume snapshot driver for Windows 2000 source from StorageCraft (founded by ex-PowerQuest people), was rebranded and released as a consumer product called "Norton Ghost" version 9. The genuine Ghost product was at the time sold to consumers as Norton Ghost 2003, and to businesses as Symantec Ghost Enterprise Edition 8. The choice of "Norton Ghost 9" as the branding for the ex-PowerQuest product was done to position it as not just consumer but also as the successor to the genuine business product (despite it having none of the capabilities of that) to leverage off our brand, although what it mostly accomplished was to poison our brand and confuse our customers. [ Symantec Ghost 8 was rebranded with a minor update issued as "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v1" when development was cancelled and it went to maintenance-only; we put out an update by borrowing ahead on our maintenance budget to get out a 1.1 update to that, and then after the Veritas merger genuine Ghost was uncancelled. When the new Veritas managers took over supervising both our team and the ex-PQ one and saw that we still made substantially more money than they did, they unwound some of the changes made to kill out line of business - but not all, and from then on our funding was kept too low for us to advance the product rapidly and we were unable to replace staff. As a result although Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v2 and 2.5 eventually followed, in April 2009 we were just about to enter beta for 3.0 when the team was disbanded and the site closed.] Using the ex-PQ product as a consumer backup product was reasonable, as it was a dumb block-based product, but thanks to the storage driver they installed combined with VSS it had differentials, which genuine Ghost didn't. However, branding the consumer PQ product as Ghost was a disaster for the genuine Ghost product, both in terms of causing massive brand confusion, and thanks to the politics ensuring we never got properly funded from 2004 onwards. An interesting experiment came from later, post-Veritas attempts to reduce the costly damage to the Ghost brand that "Norton Ghost" was causing; the exact same consumer product was released as "Norton Save and Restore 1.0", with a decent marketing push. Exact same product, it sold about 1/10 as much without the "Ghost" brand. Although the business Symantec Ghost did many times the revenue of the PQ consumer "Norton Ghost", this was enough to ensure that the (deliberately created) branding confusion was never properly fixed.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Interesting story. So ghost has been around for a while, its a filesystem aware dump and restore utility. Its very useful and can do differential dumps. It no doubt needs relatively small amounts of development/support. One might guess this would be like 'free' money for a company like Semantic. And yet they can't recover the cost of an automated email support system and a fractional engineer. What does that say about their overhead as a software company? Google is (in)famous for 'support by peer group' types of things. Might work here. So this is a way in which open source can 'win' in the Windows world as well I think as a way of lowering costs and getting the fractional engineer out of the volunteers that maintain it and the perhaps run the faq. I find those to be interesting business questions.

aperley 13y ago
Supporting newer OSes (UEFI secure boot, Win8, etc.) requires more than a small amount of development, hence the move to Symantec's product.
weej 13y ago
It tells me that SYMANTEC is no longer making a decent enough profit margin to justify the operational and support systems expenses for the product. Google's support by peer group plays towards online tools and web services. If you've every done ANY large client-side, windows based software development while trying to support aging versions of OS and application distributions it is no SMALL task.

japaget 13y ago

I use Drive Snapshot, http://www.drivesnapshot.de http://www.drivesnapshot.de . Tweakhound recommends Acronis True Image, http://www.tweakhound.com/acronis-true-image/ http://www.tweakhound.com/acronis-true-image/ . I have noticed that Symantec (the owner of the Norton brand) often buys good software from other companies and after the acquisition the quality declines. Ghost was bought by Symantec from Binary Research, a New Zealand startup, in 1998.

derleth 13y ago

What's the advantage of Norton Ghost over rsync?

Selfcommit 13y ago

Another (And better) alternative.. http://www.fogproject.org http://www.fogproject.org

huhtenberg 13y ago
Elaborate on "better"?
- Selfcommit 13y ago
  Free? (Does not make it better but it's a good start.) Some high points: -Records and inventories all systems it contacts -Has a windows client piece capable of domain joining/restarts/running 'snap-ins' or executables deployed from the FOG server up to 8M -Very supportive and helpful community

liveoneggs 13y ago

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

adyio 13y ago

Image for Windows is a good replacement. Also available for Linux. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm

jimueller 13y ago

I interpret that as Ghost is being renamed to SSR with a few new OSs supported.

gnarbarian 13y ago

It bugs me when someone uses software in a singular form: "Norton Ghost is a software which makes life easier" it reminds me of: "Kettle is a cookware for boiling water" It just seems strange to me.