Is it possible to make a system image (complete XP OS) using multiple blue ray disks with Ghost 15? If so, how? When I attempt it, it starts out correctly but terminates after some time with a message to the effect that the media is too small. In contrast, Microsoft 4mm tape backup simply prompts the operator to put in additional tapes until the job is complete.
I already use Ghost 15 to back to a large external HDD but that method though fast has failed me twice. Once was the complete failure of the HDD. So, I want to diversify by having an occasional backup to an large optical media such as blue-ray. These optical media have proven in my case to be more system reliable than magnetic tape or disk.
My system and application setups are complex so regenerating them from scratch is expensive.
Is it possible to make a system image (complete XP OS) using multiple blue ray disks with Ghost 15? If so, how? When I attempt it, it starts out correctly but terminates after some time with a message to the effect that the media is too small. In contrast, Microsoft 4mm tape backup simply prompts the operator to put in additional tapes until the job is complete.
I already use Ghost 15 to back to a large external HDD but that method though fast has failed me twice. Once was the complete failure of the HDD. So, I want to diversify by having an occasional backup to an large optical media such as blue-ray. These optical media have proven in my case to be more system reliable than magnetic tape or disk.
My system and application setups are complex so regenerating them from scratch is expensive.
I don't agree with you about optical media being more reliable that a harddisk, but to each his own.
You can have Ghost limit the backup size to 25GB or whatever size you need to fit on the Blu-Ray disc by going through the Backup Wizard and choosing the Advanced radio button. Then use ImageBurn or other to burn the v2i files to Blu-Ray. You will manually have to type in the size in MB.
I have tried your suggestion but the Advanced Option entry to alter the file size is "greyed out" which does not allow me to alter the size. Note also that the backup is automatically set as an independent recovery point since I have already defined another incremental backup that uses an external, USB hard drive. Do I need to remove the incremental job definition before I can accomplish this? Afterwards, can I put the original incremental job back by redefining it?
Select the source drive and choose a destination on a hard drive (not blue ray).
The next screen is "options", click the advanced button and check the box to devide into smaller files.
There is 1024MB in a GB, so if you want the files to be 23GB you want to type 23552 into that box.
(just make sure they end up smaller than your blue ray disks)
When the image is done burn the files to blue ray.
If that works out for you, you can alter your full images to always split the image into smaller files and then burn them to blue ray whenever you want.
Personally I agree with Red, I don't trust optical disks either and they are a pain to make. I also want redundancy but prefer using additional hard drives or computers to hold extra copies.
Thank you. Breaking up the one time backup into smaller files and temporary storage on the large external disk seems to be the solution. I used another program to copy those files to Blue Ray. I then tested the process by using the Blue Ray files back loaded to a different external drive directory to accomplish a Ghost system restore on a spare computer system. After some forcing issues such as target partion size, the system was restored on the spare. Of course since the computers were different, I had to reload some device drivers subsequently.