Norton Ghost has moved on to the next life after Symantec pulled the plug on the software. Symantec has discontinued selling Norton Ghost as of yesterday. Support for the product, however, will continue until June 30, 2014 via chat and the online knowledge base.
Symantec had the announcement posted to the Norton Ghost webpage. I used Ghost previously as Symantec Ghost. It certainly had a wide variety of uses but as time went on the problems and bugs encountered seemed to increase while its usefulness decreased.
On the Norton Ghost page, the announcement reads:
An important update regarding Norton Ghost
We’d like to share some important information with you, our valued Norton customer. As of April 30, 2013, Symantec will discontinue sales of Norton Ghost, but will continue to provide support via chat and knowledge base through June 30, 2014.
If you are a current customer of Norton Ghost now looking for an alternative or you are just looking for a Windows cloning solution, there are two popular alternatives:
When I was encountering errors with Symantec Ghost and I already had concerns with license compliance, I switched over to Clonezilla. It was faster and less likely to waste your time when errors show up 98% of the way through the cloning process. Using YUMI, it was a breeze to add Clonezilla to the other utilities on my USB drive.
With free, open-source competition doing the job better and new Windows versions/free Microsoft tools like MDT reducing the number of customers, putting Norton Ghost out of its misery seemed like the best choice for Symantec. I know the Norton brand has certainly haunted me in previous years.