A ghost has been defined as the disembodied spirit or soul of a deceased person.But here we say "ghost",it means a disk cloning program originally developed by Binary Research.
Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer hard disk to another disk or to an "image" file (Sometimes referred to as Ghost Imaging). Often, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image. This procedure is also useful when moving to a larger capacity disk.
If disk cloning has failed,you may lose computer's data and files or damage file system and some other consequences.
A disk cloning program needs to be able to read even protected operating system files on the source disk, and must guarantee that the system is in a consistent state at the time of reading. It must also overwrite any operating system already present on the destination disk. To simplify these tasks, most disk cloning programs can run under an operating system different from the native operating system of the host computer, for example, MS-DOS or an equivalent such as PC-DOS or DR-DOS, or Linux. The computer is booted from this operating system, the cloning program is loaded and copies the Windows file system. Many programs (e.g. Acronis True Image) can clone a disk, or make an image, from within Windows, with special provision for copying open files; but an image cannot be restored onto the Windows System Drive under Windows.
of course,the most popular disk cloning program is ghost.
Initially, Ghost supported only FAT filesystems directly, but it could also copy (although not resize) other filesystems by performing a sector copy. Ghost added support for the NTFS filesystem later.
It help you backup your computer directly to Blu-ray, DVD, or CD. Or, you can copy recovery points to Blu-ray, DVD, or CD.
Although disk cloning programs are not primarily backup programs, they are sometimes used as such. A key feature of a backup program is to allow the retrieval of individual files without needing to restore the entire backup. Disk cloning programs either provide a Windows Explorer-like program to browse image files and extract individual files from them, or allow an image file to be mounted as a read-only filesystem within Windows Explorer.
Ghost is marketed as a backup program. It comes with an ISO file that needs to be written to a CD. This provides a recovery environment to perform a full system recovery. There's also provision to mount a drive & select backed-up files from that drive and recover them to the primary hard disk.
Ghost can copy the contents of one hard drive to another and can convert a hard drive's contents to a virtual disk format such as VMware's VMDK file.
You can easy to restore your files which have been ghosted success,but if you ghost fail,you need recover data and files with some specialized data recovery tool,such as Diskgetor data recovery.