"And SSR said to bring many advantages <i>suck</i> as Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 , 64bit , UEFI secure boot support and USB recovery disk support."<p>Dude, that's a hell of a typo. Umm.. I agree? Heh.<p>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.<p>(1) Technically I think the cable came with an overpriced utility called "Laplink".
Shame, one of the few Symantec products that didn't come with an accompanying <i>sigh</i> with use.<p>Can't say I'm surprised, iirc development was halted in 2010 with the firing/reallocation of the team behind it.
I use Drive Snapshot, <a href="http://www.drivesnapshot.de" rel="nofollow">http://www.drivesnapshot.de</a> .<p>Tweakhound recommends Acronis True Image, <a href="http://www.tweakhound.com/acronis-true-image/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tweakhound.com/acronis-true-image/</a> .<p>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.
Interesting story.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
"It allows users to create a block level disk backups and restore it with ease"<p>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.
Image for Windows is a good replacement. Also available for Linux.<p><a href="http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm</a>
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"<p>It just seems strange to me.