

Norton Ghost discontinued - ruchirablog
http://www.ruchirablog.com/norton-ghost-discontinued/

======
noonespecial
"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
Laplink. Now there's some memories right there. :)

~~~
ChrisClark
I think it came with a giant yellow parallel port cable, right?

~~~
onemorepassword
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
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.

------
jamescun
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
Couldn't agree more... the one product that wasn't inherently horrible...

------
japaget
I use Drive Snapshot, <http://www.drivesnapshot.de> .

Tweakhound recommends 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.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
weej
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.

------
ambrop7
"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
>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.

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

~~~
csense
Open-source utilities running from livecd.

    
    
       dd if=/dev/sda bs=16777216 | gzip -c9 > /path/to/sda.img.gz
    

If you have the pv utility installed, you can get progress bars:

    
    
       dd if=/dev/sda bs=16777216 | pv -c -W | gzip -c9 | pv -c -W > /path/to/sda.img.gz
    

To restore (WARNING: THE FOLLOWING COMMAND IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, USE IT ONLY
IF YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DOING):

    
    
       pv -c -W /path/to/sda.img.gz | gzip -cd | pv -c -W | dd bs=16777216 of=/dev/sdx
    

Of course, you can use your favorite compression program instead of gzip; on
Debian-like systems, bzip2 or xz should be drop-in replacements available by
default.

If you want a compressed image which you can mount read-only without
uncompressing (e.g. if you want to be able to reach into the backup and pull
out a single file or directory), you can pipe the dump to a FIFO and then use
the pseudo-file feature of mksquashfs [1]. E.g. something like this (commands
not tested, there may be typos):

    
    
        mkfifo sda.fifo
        echo 'sda.img f 444 root root cat sda.fifo' > sda.pf
        dd if=/dev/sda bs=16777216 > sda.fifo &
        mkdir empty
        mksquashfs empty sda.squashfs -pf sda.pf
        mount -o ro,loop sda.squashfs /mnt
    

You then have an uncompressed image visible. If it's a whole-disk image
(/dev/sda instead of /dev/sda1), you need to use a program called kpartx to
make device nodes for each partition.

I recommend reading the man pages and playing around with these utilities in a
Virtualbox VM with a small disk.

Of course, this approach doesn't pay any attention to filesystems. Which means
it works with Windows partitions (unlike LVM or btrfs snapshots). But there
are limitations; it reads and stores "empty" space not occupied by files (I
recommend making a large file full of zeroes beforehand to make the empty
space compress better), restoring to a smaller disk is difficult if not
impossible, restoring to a larger disk requires you to resize manually
afterwards if you want to use the extra space.

[1] It's a little easier conceptually to make a squashfs directly from an
image file, but that approach requires you to store the image file, which
requires temp space equal to the size of the disk you're backing up. The
pseudo-file approach has a benefit of not needing temporary space equal to the
size of the disk being backed up, you just need enough space for the
compressed result.

~~~
lobster_johnson
That misses much of what Ghost does. Ghost is file-system-aware, so it's not a
byte-for-byte cloner. It can copy one volume to a large volume, and vice
versa.

You can accomplish the same thing in Linux, of course, but it requires a lot
more than just "dd".

~~~
westurner
<http://clonezilla.org> supports <http://partclone.org/> ,
<http://www.partimage.org/> , dd, and ntfsclone.

------
Selfcommit
Another (And better) alternative.. <http://www.fogproject.org>

~~~
huhtenberg
Elaborate on "better"?

~~~
Selfcommit
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

------
adyio
Image for Windows is a good replacement. Also available for Linux.

<http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm>

------
gnarbarian
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.

------
liveoneggs
<http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/>

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

------
Gravityloss
Thought this was a motorcycle...

------
derleth
What's the advantage of Norton Ghost over rsync?

