Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file format use for NTFS in .GHO containers wasn't a pure file archive as it was for FAT32. That original Ghost was developed in the mid-90's and purchased from Binary Research; development on that continued in Auckland until 2009 when everyone but myself and another engineer was laid off (he and I maintained the product and helped transition it to mothballed state, and then we were laid off mid-2010).
PowerQuest's Drive Image product was block-level, and that's the product sold as "Norton Ghost" and which has been cancelled (although like Symantec Ghost, everyone who worked on it has long been laid off; both ended up in maintenance-only mode looked after by separate teams in Symantec's facility in Pune).
Later on, "Norton 360" ended up with another separately acquired file-level backup product not related to either genuine Ghost or PowerQuest's product line (or any of the Veritas products either).
Neither the corporate Symantec Ghost - genuine Ghost, ex Binary Research - nor the consumer Norton Ghost - ex-PQ evolved out of Drive Image - shared any code at all, except for a small DLL used to allow the Symantec Ghost product to read from V2i images created by the consumer product and treat them the same as VHD or VMDK files when we added support for using those.
The branding confusion stems from when PowerQuest failed and was acquired by Symantec. One of the ex-PowerQuest managers was put in charge of not just the rump of PQ, but also PCAnywhere and genuine Ghost, and this resulted almost immediately in genuine Ghost (which made more net profit than PowerQuest had revenue) being cancelled in 2004, and most of the staff assigned to supporting PowerQuest's legacy Drive Image product or writing plug-ins for another acqusition done at the same time as PQ (On iCommand, later eventually withdrawn since it was unfit for sale). PowerQuest's V2i windows product, which included a volume snapshot driver for Windows 2000 source from StorageCraft (founded by ex-PowerQuest people), was rebranded and released as a consumer product called "Norton Ghost" version 9.
The genuine Ghost product was at the time sold to consumers as Norton Ghost 2003, and to businesses as Symantec Ghost Enterprise Edition 8. The choice of "Norton Ghost 9" as the branding for the ex-PowerQuest product was done to position it as not just consumer but also as the successor to the genuine business product (despite it having none of the capabilities of that) to leverage off our brand, although what it mostly accomplished was to poison our brand and confuse our customers.
[ Symantec Ghost 8 was rebranded with a minor update issued as "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v1" when development was cancelled and it went to maintenance-only; we put out an update by borrowing ahead on our maintenance budget to get out a 1.1 update to that, and then after the Veritas merger genuine Ghost was uncancelled. When the new Veritas managers took over supervising both our team and the ex-PQ one and saw that we still made substantially more money than they did, they unwound some of the changes made to kill out line of business - but not all, and from then on our funding was kept too low for us to advance the product rapidly and we were unable to replace staff. As a result although Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v2 and 2.5 eventually followed, in April 2009 we were just about to enter beta for 3.0 when the team was disbanded and the site closed.]
Using the ex-PQ product as a consumer backup product was reasonable, as it was a dumb block-based product, but thanks to the storage driver they installed combined with VSS it had differentials, which genuine Ghost didn't. However, branding the consumer PQ product as Ghost was a disaster for the genuine Ghost product, both in terms of causing massive brand confusion, and thanks to the politics ensuring we never got properly funded from 2004 onwards.
An interesting experiment came from later, post-Veritas attempts to reduce the costly damage to the Ghost brand that "Norton Ghost" was causing; the exact same consumer product was released as "Norton Save and Restore 1.0", with a decent marketing push. Exact same product, it sold about 1/10 as much without the "Ghost" brand. Although the business Symantec Ghost did many times the revenue of the PQ consumer "Norton Ghost", this was enough to ensure that the (deliberately created) branding confusion was never properly fixed.
PowerQuest's Drive Image product was block-level, and that's the product sold as "Norton Ghost" and which has been cancelled (although like Symantec Ghost, everyone who worked on it has long been laid off; both ended up in maintenance-only mode looked after by separate teams in Symantec's facility in Pune).
Later on, "Norton 360" ended up with another separately acquired file-level backup product not related to either genuine Ghost or PowerQuest's product line (or any of the Veritas products either).
Neither the corporate Symantec Ghost - genuine Ghost, ex Binary Research - nor the consumer Norton Ghost - ex-PQ evolved out of Drive Image - shared any code at all, except for a small DLL used to allow the Symantec Ghost product to read from V2i images created by the consumer product and treat them the same as VHD or VMDK files when we added support for using those.
The branding confusion stems from when PowerQuest failed and was acquired by Symantec. One of the ex-PowerQuest managers was put in charge of not just the rump of PQ, but also PCAnywhere and genuine Ghost, and this resulted almost immediately in genuine Ghost (which made more net profit than PowerQuest had revenue) being cancelled in 2004, and most of the staff assigned to supporting PowerQuest's legacy Drive Image product or writing plug-ins for another acqusition done at the same time as PQ (On iCommand, later eventually withdrawn since it was unfit for sale). PowerQuest's V2i windows product, which included a volume snapshot driver for Windows 2000 source from StorageCraft (founded by ex-PowerQuest people), was rebranded and released as a consumer product called "Norton Ghost" version 9.
The genuine Ghost product was at the time sold to consumers as Norton Ghost 2003, and to businesses as Symantec Ghost Enterprise Edition 8. The choice of "Norton Ghost 9" as the branding for the ex-PowerQuest product was done to position it as not just consumer but also as the successor to the genuine business product (despite it having none of the capabilities of that) to leverage off our brand, although what it mostly accomplished was to poison our brand and confuse our customers.
[ Symantec Ghost 8 was rebranded with a minor update issued as "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v1" when development was cancelled and it went to maintenance-only; we put out an update by borrowing ahead on our maintenance budget to get out a 1.1 update to that, and then after the Veritas merger genuine Ghost was uncancelled. When the new Veritas managers took over supervising both our team and the ex-PQ one and saw that we still made substantially more money than they did, they unwound some of the changes made to kill out line of business - but not all, and from then on our funding was kept too low for us to advance the product rapidly and we were unable to replace staff. As a result although Symantec Ghost Solution Suite v2 and 2.5 eventually followed, in April 2009 we were just about to enter beta for 3.0 when the team was disbanded and the site closed.]
Using the ex-PQ product as a consumer backup product was reasonable, as it was a dumb block-based product, but thanks to the storage driver they installed combined with VSS it had differentials, which genuine Ghost didn't. However, branding the consumer PQ product as Ghost was a disaster for the genuine Ghost product, both in terms of causing massive brand confusion, and thanks to the politics ensuring we never got properly funded from 2004 onwards.
An interesting experiment came from later, post-Veritas attempts to reduce the costly damage to the Ghost brand that "Norton Ghost" was causing; the exact same consumer product was released as "Norton Save and Restore 1.0", with a decent marketing push. Exact same product, it sold about 1/10 as much without the "Ghost" brand. Although the business Symantec Ghost did many times the revenue of the PQ consumer "Norton Ghost", this was enough to ensure that the (deliberately created) branding confusion was never properly fixed.