Except it isn’t that straightforward - you can, for example, use the most recently released version of Ghost (version 15) with Windows 7 and earlier. This might seem like a fairly obvious question to answer: you can’t keep using Norton Ghost because it’s been discontinued. For a full explanation of Symantec’s rise and fall as cyber security behemoth, this Forbes article is very good. The final nail in the coffin was Symantec’s failure as a business - its remains were purchased by Broadcom in late 2019, which is where you can find small remnants of Ghost and Ghost Solution Suite.

The declining popularity meant Symantec eventually decided to discontinue the product in 2013, removing support a year later and encouraging users to move to Symantec System Recovery - a product which is today known, somewhat confusingly as Veritas System Recovery, owing to Symantec’s earlier merger with Veritas.īy the time Norton Ghost was discontinued, the market was in a very different shape to how it would have looked when the software was first launched.

However, Symantec, the company behind the Norton series of products, quickly killed off its popularity by slapping on a price tag. Indeed, the extent of its popularity can be demonstrated by the fact that ‘ghost’ became a colloquialism for making a sectorwise copy or clone. Norton Ghost was one of the first, best, and most popular, disk imaging tools available for many years. Why did Symantec discontinue Norton Ghost? Alongside Norton Ghost - which is what we’ll focus on throughout this post - there is also Ghost Solution Suite (GSS), a fully featured deployment platform aimed at the enterprise market. It’s worth noting before we continue that there are (or were) two different products bearing the Ghost name. We’ll look more closely at what Macrium Reflect offers you over Norton Ghost, but first we’ll go over the reasons why Norton Ghost was discontinued. Macrium Reflect Free is a free, simple tool that can be used to image and clone Windows disks, but Macrium also has a number of paid products that include additional powerful features that can provide you with the flexibility and security required to protect your data effectively. For many Windows users looking for reliable, and powerful backup today, it is still very much a case of seeking out a good replacement for Norton Ghost.įortunately, Macrium is on hand to help with a powerful and popular alternative to Norton Ghost. The rise and fall of the first disk cloning toolĪlthough Norton Ghost was discontinued all the way back in 2013, its legacy appears to be strong - unsurprising, perhaps, given that it was around throughout much of the nineties, a period that feels like the very early years of home computing.

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