Best Free Norton Ghost Alternative for Windows 10 or 11


Table of Contents
  1. Norton Ghost Overview
  2. What Is the Best Norton Ghost Alternative?
  3. How to Use Norton Ghost Alternative in Windows 10/11
  4. To Sum Up

Norton Ghost Overview

Symantec Norton Ghost (disk utility) is a powerful disk backup and cloning software running in Windows XP (SP2 or later), Vista, and 7 for home and small business users, which was discontinued on April 30th, 2013, and the support for Norton Ghost ended on June 30th , 2014.

The last version is Norton Ghost 15 and its key features like backup and recovery have been built into other Norton products such as the new Norton 360 or Symantec Ghost Solution Suite.

Norton Ghost 15 Trial GUI

What does Norton Ghost 15 (no free version) do in Windows XP, Vista, and 7? The following are the main features provided by Norton Ghost:

However, Norton Ghost is not available for users, even though it is available in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and 11. Many users complained that Norton Ghost 15 backup is very slow. Moreover, you have to pay for Norton Ghost before doing anything. Hence, if you would like to protect your critical data and hard disk safely, it's time to find another best free Norton Ghost alternative.

What Is the Best Norton Ghost Alternative?

Considering these powerful features in Norton Ghost, it's strongly recommended to try the best Norton Ghost alternative - Qiling Disk Master Standard. It has the following advantages:

And the most important thing is that it's freeware for you to manage data.

How to Use Norton Ghost Alternative in Windows 10/11

To get clear on how to use this Norton Ghost alternative in Windows 10/11, we will show you the detailed steps of cloning the system disk in Windows.

First of all, please download Qiling Disk Master Standard and give it a shot. For server users, try Qiling Disk Master Server!

1. Execute Norton Ghost free alternative - Qiling Disk Master Standard, and select Tools -> Disk Clone on the main console.

Disk Clone

2. Choose the Windows system disk as the source disk to clone, and hit Next >>.

Select Source Disk

3. Tap another larger HDD or SSD as the destination disk to save all the files from the Windows hard disk, and press the Next >> button to go on.

Select Destination Disk

☪Tips:
✍The destination disk will be deleted or overwritten after the clone is finished.
✍You are able to clone larger hard drive to smaller one as long as the data capacity on the source disk is smaller than the destination disk.

4. Press Proceed to clone the hard drive with the free Norton Ghost alternative.

Proceed

☪Tips:
SSD Alignment: Check this option if the destination disk is a solid-state drive (SSD) to optimize for your SSD.
Sector by sector clone: clone all the sectors on the source disk whether it is used or not, even bad sectors.
Edit partitions: It's a premium feature to adjust partitions on the destination disk while cloning a smaller drive to a larger drive. And it still supports cloning MBR to GPT and converting disk types, and vice versa.

After the cloning is finished, replace the hard drive with the larger one safely and change the boot order to boot from the cloned drive, or keep it safe as an alternative backup.

However, sometimes, you may encounter the cloned SSD won't boot or Winload.efi missing after clone, please check if the boot mode (Legacy BIOS for MBR and UEFI for GPT) is correct first. If it is still not working, try the following two methods.

#1: Run startup repair in the recovery environment.

#2: Use the bootrec command to fix MBR and rebuild BCD.

For detailed steps, please see: cloned SSD won't boot Windows 10.

To Sum Up

As the best free Norton Ghost alternative - Qiling Disk Master Standard, it integrates backup, restore, sync, clone, and powerful tools. Thanks to its user-friendly GUI, all users can do these operations easily in just a few clicks.

In advanced editions, you still can enjoy more powerful features, like migrating Windows 10 system to SSD, a command line tool, restoring to dissimilar hardware, real-time file sync, differential backup, etc. To back up remote computers centrally, try the centralized backup solution.

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