Older versions of Norton Ghost 2003 can be also updated from a system with a newer version of Norton Ghost 2003 by copying program directory from newer to older. As of April 24, 2008, the latest version available from the archive is 2003.793. Two Symantec knowledge base articles (Updates to Norton Ghost 2003How to obtain the programs updates that are archived on Symantec LiveUpdate server) provide step-by-step instructions detailing how to obtain Norton Ghost 2003 updates from the LiveUpdate Archive. Symantec deprecated LiveUpdate support for Norton Ghost 2003 in early 2006. The machine still needs to reboot to the Virtual Partition, but the user doesn't need to interact with DOS. A simpler, non-corporate version of Ghost, Norton Ghost 2003 does not include the Console but has a Windows front-end to script Ghost operations and create a bootable Ghost diskette (third-party CD burning software can be used to create a bootable Ghost CD based on a bootable Ghost diskette). Available as an independent product, Norton Ghost 2003 was also included as a component of Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional. Norton Ghost 2003, a consumer edition of Ghost, was released on September 6, 2002. In 1998, Ghost 4.1 allowed for password-protected images. The additional memory available allowed Ghost to provide several levels of compression for images, and to provide the file browser. Version 4.0 also moved from real-modeDOS to 286protected-mode.
Ghost Explorer could work with images from older versions but only slowly version 4 images contained indexes to find files rapidly. Until 2007, Ghost Explorer could extract files from NTFS images but not edit NTFS images. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to allow users to add and delete files on FAT, later on ext2, ext3 and NTFS filesystems in an image. This version also introduced Ghost Explorer, a Windows program which allowed a user to browse the contents of an image file and extract individual files from it. Multicasting allows 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.