TeraByte Unlimited

I have 4TB disk drives. Twelve of them. Four of those I need to back up. What I am going to do is to store these images to 4TB external hard drives. These 4TB external hard drives are a bit finicky in that sometimes they can just drop off of the USB listing. This usually happens if I try to move one of the huge backup files over to the external hard drive.

Now, my average size of a backup file (after Terabyte creates it) is 2.6TB. Yes, that's right, 2.6 Terabytes in size. So I wondered - will the TeraByte Images for Windows software split a backup into multiple files.

This is where I just groaned. It turns out that the Images for Windows software WILL backup and split up a file but only into a maximum of 7.95GB. So - as you can see - 2.6TB / 7.95GB = 327.0440251572327 files. Which just about made me faint.

Therefore - is there a possibility that instead of just giving us pre-set sizes - you just let someone put in the size wanted (like 100GB) and let the program calculate what that size actually is. (So like if you have a 2.6TB backup file, it really generates 2.6TB / 100GB = 26 files and each file is approximately 100GB in size (which comes out to 1073741824 bytes) for each file.

I also ask for this because hard drives are just getting bigger and bigger all of the time. So it makes sense to include a better way to split up the TBI files.

Thank you for reading this and please let me know if this can be changed in the program or not. Presently I have written a PHP script to take the TBI file and break it up into smaller files which I then GZip and then store onto the external hard drive but it would be nice if I could just have the files written by the program rather than me having to write software to do this.

sounds like it's backing up the entire thing rather than just used areas? Not sure why you'd want to split it up but you can enter whatever size you want.

I suggest you accept "Max" and don't create any splits.

It sounds to me like reason for limiting backup file size is that the desire is to make a copy of the backup file after it's created and the destination of the copy doesn't reliably handle having huge files copied to it. That sounds like the real issue here, but I guess sometimes one has to do whatever one has to do.

Another thing to consider is to create the backup twice, one to wherever it now being created on and once to the intended destination of the "copy". I do that all the time on an infinitely smaller scale, but maybe the intended location of the "copy" wouldn't reliably handle having the entire large backup created on it directly either.