.tib files burning to DVDs

Hello,

I have Windows XP Pro/Acronis TI-11 home/Nero burner/Sony DVD writer.

I had taken an image of my C partition and saved it to an other partition. The image file actually consists about 12 pieces of 4.5 GB each.

Due to low space I just want to burn all 12 pieces to 12 DVDs and then delete them from my hard disk.

My question is will I be able to restore the image from 12 DVDs using Acronis bootable rescue CD in any emergency?

Thanking you,

Vijay Kumar Vijay.

 

Yes, it can work but because some files will span many disks, depending on what sectors they occcupy in the total image, you will be swapping disks back and forth like a street shark moving cards around in a game of three card monty. Even a realtively small file can be in bits on numerous DVDs. The disk swapping will be unbearably tedious. Generally, images that occupy more than 2 or possibly 3 DVDs is considered the max that is practical. But it can be done.

Better would be to copy all the DVD files to one place on a hard disk before restoring and doing the restore from that location -- then the PC will take care of all the file swapping andyou one have to sit there for hours moving DVDs in and out of hte drive.

Luckily, hard drives have never been cheaper or larger -- consider getting one to use to save backups and save your DVDs for shorter tasks.

 

I do that in the same way. Almost the same way...

I burn my collected images to DVDs. If I want to restore an image then I copy all the concerning tibs from DVDs to a spare disk and restore from there.

 

It should work, especially if you copy the DVDs back to a hard drive as described, but you should do that after burning the DVDs and validate the restored image on the hard drive. One bad DVD makes the entire backup worthless.

Since you are dealing with a 50-60GB backup, it makes much more sense to buy an external hard drive of 250-500GB and save your images there. For less than $100, you get a much more convenient set up.

 

Thanks alot shieber, MrMorse & jmk94903 for your nice replies.

It would be really wiser to go for a new harddisk.

Also one more question I wish to ask is if in any emergency when I'll not be able to boot windows normally, how would I copy the contents in backup DVDs to hard disk?

Thanks again,

Vijay Kumar Vijay.

 

In those cases, a BartPE CD, VistaPE CD or Live Linux CD (Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc.) can be very useful. You can also use another computer if the hard drive is an external unit (USB, for example).