FileSystem compatibility with the Ghost Cast Server

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

You need to know the files systems that the Ghost Cast Server is compatible with. What filesystems can it restore images from? What filesystems can it write image files to?

Environment

GSS 3.3.x

Resolution

As of GSS 3.3.12 The Ghost Cast Server is compatible with the following filesystems:

FAT
FAT32
NTFS
GPT
EXT2
EXT3
XFS

Note: The Ghost Cast Server was not designed to write images directly to or restore images directly from tape drives, serial attached SCSI devices, zip drives, jaz drives, CD/DVD media, or Blu Ray media.

Note: When creating image files using the Ghost Cast Server, the image files may be broken into multiple segments. The size of these image file segments will be based on any filesize limitations imposed by the filesystem that the image is being stored on. For more information on file size limits imposed by the filesystem.

If you are saving your image on a mapped network share, the Ghost software will break the images into 2 GB segments even if the filesystem on the network share can accomodate larger files. The Ghost software does not query non-local filesystems to check for the ability to create larger files.

You may experience performance degradation when saving your image to a network share. The Ghost Cast Server must buffer a portion of the image file across the network to the temporary file respository on the Ghost Cast Server computer and then send the image file back across the network to the Ghost Client. This can result in a dramatic increase in network bandwidth consumed and data transfer speeds will be directly affected by this.

Creating an image on a filesystem that can accept large files (2 GB +) can lead to a large single file that you may not be able to move to another filesystem that can't accomodate those large files. It is recommended to use the -split=2000 parameter to ensure that all Ghost image files and segments are under the 2 GB size limit to eliminate any future complications with moving or backing up your Ghost image files.

Note: Symantec recommends adhering to an eight dot three (filename.gho) filename when creating image files.