Unlike the text-based user interface of earlier versions, 5.0 uses a graphical user interface (GUI). In 1998, Ghost 4.1 supports password-protected images.

The additional memory available allows 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 contain indexes to find files rapidly.

Until 2007, Ghost Explorer could not edit NTFS images. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to support adding and deleting files in an image with FAT, and later with ext2, ext3 and NTFS file systems. This version also introduced Ghost Explorer, a Windows program which supports browsing the contents of an image file and extract individual files from it. 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. Version 4.0 of Ghost added multicast technology, following the lead of a competitor, ImageCast. 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. Ghost could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file.

However, version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individual partitions. The first versions of Ghost supported only the cloning of entire disks. 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. The backup and recovery functionality has been replaced by Symantec System Recovery (SSR), although the Ghost imaging technology is still actively developed and is available as part of Symantec Ghost Solution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.īinary Research developed Ghost in Auckland, New Zealand. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec. 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.

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