Ghost 6.0 included a Console application in 2000 to simplify the management of large numbers of machines. There was also a Norton Ghost version (called 2.0) for Novell NetWare around 1999, with supported NSS partitions (although it ran in DOS, like the others). Gdisk serves a role similar to Fdisk, but has greater capabilities. In 1998 Gdisk, a script based partition manager, was integrated in Ghost. The Binary Research logo, two stars revolving around each other, played on the main screen while the program idled. Unlike the character-based user interface of earlier versions, 5.0 used a GUI. In 1998, Ghost 4.1 allowed for password-protected images. The additional memory available allowed Ghost to provide several levels of compression for images, and to provide the file browser. Version 4.0 also moved from real-mode DOS to 286 protected-mode. Ghost Explorer could work with images from older versions but only slowly version 4 images contained indexes to find files rapidly. Until 2007, Ghost Explorer could extract files from NTFS images but not edit NTFS images. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to allow users to add and delete files on FAT, later on ext2, ext3 and NTFS filesystems in an image. This version also introduced Ghost Explorer, a Windows program which allowed a user to browse the contents of an image file and extract individual files from it. Multicasting allows 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. Version 4.0 of Ghost added multicast technology, following the lead of a competitor, ImageCast. Ghost allowed 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. Ghost could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file. The first versions of Ghost supported only the cloning of entire disks, however version 3.1 in 1997 allowed the cloning of individual partitions. Ghost added support for the ext2 filesystem in 1999 and for ext3 subsequently. Ghostwalker is also capable of modifying the name of the Windows NT-based computer from its own interface. Ghost added support for NTFS later in 1996, and also provided a program, Ghostwalker (DOS name: ghstwalk.exe), to change the Security ID (SID) that made Windows NT systems distinguishable from each other. Initially, Ghost supported only FAT filesystems directly, but it could also copy (although not resize) other filesystems by performing a sector-by-sector copy. Ghost can copy the contents of one hard drive to another and can convert a hard drive′s contents to a virtual disk format such as VMware′s VMDK file. There is also provision to mount a drive and select backed-up files from that drive and recover them to the primary hard disk. This provides a recovery environment to perform a full system recovery. It comes with an ISO file that needs to be written to a CD. Disk cloning programs either provide a Windows Explorer-like program to browse image files and extract individual files from them, or allow an image file to be mounted as a read-only filesystem within Windows Explorer. A key feature of a backup program is to allow the retrieval of individual files without needing to restore the entire backup. Backup softwareĪlthough disk cloning programs are not primarily backup programs, they are sometimes used as such. Symantec released a prototype of Phantom as Ghost for Manufacturing in 2003. Some parts of the Phantom code, such as the ability to write to NTFS filesystems from MS-DOS, got folded into the main Ghost product. The Phantom project ran for about three years in parallel with the ongoing development of the Ghost code. The internal project name Phantom designated a complete rewrite of the Ghost cloning engine at Symantec in Auckland. However, a version of Ghost 8.0 was included on the Ghost 9 recovery disk to support existing Ghost customers. Ghost 9 continued to leverage the PowerQuest file format, meaning it wasn′t backward compatible with previous versions of Ghost. On August 2, 2004, Norton Ghost 9.0 was released as a new consumer version of Ghost, which was based on PowerQuest′s Drive Image version 7, and provided Live imaging of a Windows system. PowerQuestĪt the end of 2003, Symantec acquired its largest competitor, PowerQuest. Technologies developed by 20/20 Software were integrated into Ghost after their acquisition by Symantec in April 2000. 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. Binary Research developed Ghost in Auckland, New Zealand.
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