Scal: No, I didn't lose any data, the backup process just cost me a lot of time I could have allocated to other tasks.
What annoys me the most is that I had used Ghost in the past without difficulty, and now it won't read any media even though the media is fine. Apparently this is due to a glitch in the Gear driver software used by the program, and it's not an uncommon problem. Uninstalling and reinstalling and updating the Gear driver did not help. Prior to this I used to manually allocate and create data DVD's, which works... except that when you have 100+ GB of data it takes a long time and is very tedious, which was the whole point of wanting to automate the process. I tried using Acronis True Image, and it appeared to be working... until it got to the last disk and then failed at 100%, and did not even recognize its own backup data on disk 1, which means it did not function properly at all during the backup procedure. Apparently this is also a problem others have encountered. I've never had problems with the writer drive, and it's working fine with everything else, so I am not certain what went wrong, only that it did go wrong. It's possible that my alternate copy of Windows is having a problem (I always backup with the primary drive offline), but there is no logical reason as backups from this install have worked flawlessly in the past.
Tab: That's what I'm going to do from this point is backup to an offline hard disk. I'm going to create a RAID array and then replicate my existing drive onto the array, which was my original plan, but I wanted to get a DVD backup done prior. I have the drives for the array, two 500GB drives that I intend to run in RAID 1 (mirroring). I'll acquire an additional drive and an enclosure and use it as a spare for backups at some point in the future as my existing 160 won't be adequate for that forever.
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