Disk Spanning?

[Dovi]

I'm using a backup program, and it has an option to "Enable disk spanning on this USB Device".... wtf does that mean? I'm finding if I dont' tick it the backup isn't working, but I'd like to know what I'm actually doing my ticking this box... help

 

[BrianB]

Google makes it easy.
Disk Spanning
Disk spanning allows multiple disk drives to function like one big drive. Spanning not only overcomes disk space shortage; it also simplifies storage management by combining existing resources or adding relatively inexpensive resources. For example, four 400 MB disk drives can be combined to appear to the operating system as one single 1600 MB drive. Spanning alone does not provide reliability or performance enhancements. Spanned logical drives must have the same stripe size and must be contiguous. For example Logical Drives 1 and 2 can be spanned; Logical Drives 1 and 3 cannot.
http://www.mcsx.co.uk/articles/glossary.php#d

 

[3gmac]

I'm using a backup program, and it has an option to "Enable disk spanning on this USB Device".... wtf does that mean? I'm finding if I dont' tick it the backup isn't working, but I'd like to know what I'm actually doing my ticking this box... help

I think in this instance he is refering to the backup software disk spanning, so for example to back up 256MB data over two 128MB usb flash disks. The disk-spanning which you discovered in google most likely refers to Windows Disk Managment which when drives are simultaneously connected can be mapped to one logical drive. For example my clients server has 7 300GB drives which function as what looks like one 2.1TB drive in My Computer & on the network. This is different to RAID as it offers no performance\reliabilty increase, as you have discovered.

Your backup software is prob. mis-calculating the required space needed and so forces you to enable spanning because it *thinks* that your single usb disk does not have enough space. If it ran out it would prompt you to insert another blank usb flash disk to continue.

 

[Dovi]

Well it's an external harddrive I'm trying to backup onto, so I've got 160 gigs of space, more then enough to backup my internal harddrive. But it backups into a ZIP folder, and I'm finding that unlesss I tick the disk spanning box, I'm having troubles opening up the ZIP folder.

By enablind disk spanning is anything else happening differently? Is it as safe to backup with it ticked as it is to backup with it unticked?

 

[3gmac]

Well it's an external harddrive I'm trying to backup onto, so I've got 160 gigs of space, more then enough to backup my internal harddrive. But it backups into a ZIP folder, and I'm finding that unlesss I tick the disk spanning box, I'm having troubles opening up the ZIP folder.

By enablind disk spanning is anything else happening differently? Is it as safe to backup with it ticked as it is to backup with it unticked?

I would say that as long as you can do a restore\access those files you should be ok - it would not make it unsafe. There is no reason for it to do anything else differently if you are fitting everthing onto your external drive, as I said it is most likely just mis-calculating the required space. What backup software are you using? I personally feel better using real backup software such as Microsoft Backup rather than a program like winzip.

 

[hennievr]

Well it's an external harddrive I'm trying to backup onto, so I've got 160 gigs of space, more then enough to backup my internal harddrive. But it backups into a ZIP folder, and I'm finding that unlesss I tick the disk spanning box, I'm having troubles opening up the ZIP folder.

By enablind disk spanning is anything else happening differently? Is it as safe to backup with it ticked as it is to backup with it unticked?

Why not using Windows Backup and use hardware compression is you worried that the backup takes up too much space.