Despite the wealth of info in the forum, I can't find the answer to this one.  I would be grateful for advice.

I use Ghost 9 to save images of the HDDs of a desktop and a laptop on a network drive at home.  I need also some disaster recovery capability if working with the laptop away from home, so I exported the laptop's C: partition image as 3 spanned files, using the drop-down file size option of (approx) 4.7G.  (These were burned onto DVD+RWs along with the .sv2i file on DVD #1.  That's not the problem.)

Subsequently I saved an updated full image of the laptop's C: drive to the network drive.  The option for limited file size was not checked, but the image was split into 4.7G files anyway.  The file size limit had not shown up when the backup settings were confirmed at the start of the job.  I deleted the spanned image and repeated the backup, but this time I selected limited file size, and overwrote the maximum file size in the drop-down list with 100G.  When the settings were verified before the job started, the file size limit was shown as 100G, but when the backup was complete the files were still limited to 4.7G.  Question 1: how do I stop Ghost from splitting the image?

When exporting the original single image as spanned files, I noticed that the help files and the manual say that when exporting one can consolidate spanned images or incremental images into single files.  Unfortunately neither the help files nor the manual tell you how to perform that consolidation.  Question 2: how can I consolidate spanned or incremental image files into a single file?

Still here, and still hoping that someone knows how to stop Ghost 9 splitting the image.

Ian, did you choose 4589 MB for your split size? I guess so because this is the only 4 GB choice and surprisingly it doesn't fit on a DVD as it's too large. Symantec messed up. Your image did fit on a DVD so it must have been less than 4482 MB. Is the destination partition on your network, FAT32?

In KB, how large are your images?

Brian

My network drive is a Freecom FSG3.  Examining its properties from Windows XP doesn't reveal the FS, which is not specified in the manual either.  One of the replies on the FSG Wiki site says that it uses Samba so that the FS is usable by Windows and MAC platforms.  The only other clue I can find is that users are recommended that external drives connected to the FSG should be FAT32 formatted for full read/write functionality: not conclusive, but it suggests that might be the FSG internal FS too.

Regards

Ian

Quote:


You can “consolidate” a backup image set. Double click the relevant .iv2i and the Backup Image Browser opens. Click the Export backup image file icon (fourth from right), then choose a destination and compression level. In effect you now have the equivalent of a baseline image taken on the day of the incremental image.

Thanks to Brian's prompts I now have a solution.  The 'spanning problem' was a mixture of my ignorance, and the misleading abbreviations we take for granted.  What I have learned may help other novices: experts should go look at another thread.

We all 'know' what 1MB means, don't we?  Actually it could be 1,048,576B (= 1MiB), or 1,024,000B, or 1,000,000B.  At 1GB there are 4 valid definitions, ranging from 1,073,741,824B (= 1GiB) to 1,000,000,000B.  Most of the time such differences are not too important, but if you're squeezing as much as you can onto a DVD, they matter.

When Ghost 9 offers file size options for ease of archiving on different media, the 4,589MB size is intended for DVD - but it doesn't fit.  The (standard, single layer, single side) DVD capacity is 4.7GB or 4.377GiB or 4,481MiB.  Therefore, if you want an image split into files which will fit onto 4.7GB DVDs, then you check the “Divide the backup image . . .” option, and you type 4481 into the “File size” box in place of the standard sizes in the drop-down list.  Each of the resultant files will then fit on a 4.7GB DVD, along with the .sv2i file on disk 1 if it is a multi-partition image.

The other part of my problem was, as Brian suggested, due to the filing system on the target drive where the image was being written.  I had become accustomed to NTFS, but on this occasion the target was FAT32.  It didn’t matter whether I deselected the “Divide the backup image . . .” option, or selected file size 4589MB, or typed in 4481MB, Ghost correctly and consistently produced files of 4,194,176kB on the FAT32 target drive, apart from the smaller, final file of the set.

Again confirming Brian’s advice, if you have a set of files which together represent a single partition image, they can be consolidated into a single file.  If you double click one of the set in Windows Explorer, this will open them in the Ghost Image Browser, and you can use File/Export, with the “Divide the backup image . . .” option unselected, to export them as a single file – as long as the target drive will accept a file that big!

Finally, I offer a big thank you to Brian for steering me in the right direction.