it's not really a foobar question, although ill use it to sort the songs by the way ill burn them.

i have 40GB of music on my computer and i want to backup it on DVDs.
how would you sort the discs?
by abc artists?
by year?
by genre?

any other recommendations before burning?

thanx.

For me, Artists is the most logical way to do it. But it doesn't really make a lot of difference.

What i'd do is:

1. Select about 1 dvd worth of files, create Par2 files for them (enough to fill a cdrom) for recovery OR just use DVDisaster to create a recovery CD-ROM. (1 cd for every dvd)

2. Burn the DVD. With Verify option enabled.

3. I'm extra paranoid, so i'd probably burn a duplicate dvd too and keep it somewhere else.

Main points: create a recovery volume. Par2 or dvdisaster.

No backup on DVD for me : I use a second HDD and mirror my collection on it using a command line tool called rsync which is quite easy to use.

DVDs are a hassle when compared to simply using a hard drive. PS you can use Syncback SE (it's free) to do the syncing. It's really easy to use and powerful.

Damn...40GB to DVDs...Its not something Id do (External HDD) but id agree with kanak.

Must look in to rsync more

Then why post it in the foobar forum?! Thread moved.

Is it possible to create recovery information from the data before you burn it? From looking at the dvdisaster website, it seems that I would have to burn a dvd, then read it in dvdisaster in order to come up with the error correction. Wouldn't it be easier to generate the recovery data before or when you are burning the disc? Can you do this with par2?

Strongly seconded. That's what I use too.

With Par2, the recovery files have to be created beforehand (check out the QuickPar website, it has some pretty useful guides).

With DVDisaster, i believe the recommended method is to first burn an image, which is then mounted. You run DVDisaster to create your recovery CD from the mounted image. Finally, you burn your DVD. (There may be an easier / better way to do it; but with dvdisaster the recovery data is created after you burn dvd/image).

hope that helps.

PS any reason you're not considering hard drive backups? They're much simpler and faster.

I was wondering if dvdisaster would be able to create recovery data from mounted images or if the mounted images were fundamentally different from the burned disc, at least in terms of error correction. Par2 seems like a better solution anyway.

And for hard drive backup, I would consider that but DVDs are really much more affordable. I have 520gigs of storage with another 500gig drive on the way. The 500 gig drive cost me $130, but it's only $5-10 for a stack of 100 DVDs (437gig) if you buy them at the right time. Plus, if I lose a DVD or it becomes unreadable, that's only 4 gigs of data that I have to re-rip or download, and for special tracks it only takes 6 minutes to burn a duplicate.

It does take a lot of time to backup files on DVD but my time is cheap...I'm a college student without a job.

For just 40GB, you can go in any direction.

I use twin raided drives (1TB total) for CDs and current listening. If one fails, pop-in a new drive and rebuild the raid.
I burn the rest to DVD by Artist, then catalog the DVD in Music Collector (Collectorz.com cataloger).

I do not use backup software. Waste of money for me. My OS is on a seperate partition, and easy to rebuild/reinstall without harming the other partitions or drives. Some backup devices/software use their own flavor of format, so choose carefully. For some interesting hardware selections, check these out...

Netgear SC101 [http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage.aspx]
D-Link DNS-323 [http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=509]
Thecus Y.E.S. Box N2100 [http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=1&pid=1]

I have heard good things about the YES Box, and the iTunes share and FTP options are nifty. The D-Link also sports FTP. The Netgear has it's own flavor of format but is cheap. FTP makes it a snap to download from anywhere to your cell phone or other wireless handheld. Just some ideas to throw into the mix.

Lots of interesting and vaired answers here. You can tell who are the techies.

Good luck in whatever you choose!

PS: I've never had a DVD go bad, only a CD, and that was my fault as I failed to notice the cheesy blanks I bought were virtually see-thru when you held them up in front of a light. I was able to recover from them by slapping on a plain label and re-archived them onto TDK DVDs. Why TDK? Because not one person I know who uses them has had any kind of failure on one yet in the last 5 years (except, of course, for user error).

thank you all for your great answers.
ill check it out. i like the dvdisaster for the extra safety.

about backup with other hard drive - it all about the money
40 gig will use about 9-10 dvds.
I was also advised to burn to dvds once a year - so if 1 dvd will not work - i'll have the other from last year.

thank you again.

I've just recently backed up ~125GiB of data to DVD+Rs with dvdisaster/RS02 (don't bother about RS01, it's too complicated!). Took 1-1.5 weeks (this method gets extremely boring, so I only did a few DVD+Rs per day).

I don't recommend using PAR2 for that many much data, because this process takes longer than using dvdisaster's RS02 iso image padding - less work steps.


Nah, rather just check them after one year, and replace only those that start to fail (you would have used dvdisaster for creating the DVD±Rs remember! it can recover damaged sectors). Also the older the discs the more regularly check them. Write the date of creation on the disc (use "CD marker" only!).

Nero CD-DVD Speed is a good tool for testing the readability of optical media.

If you really want to burn the same data each year to a new set of DVD±Rs then I really recommend buying a harddrive instead, that's much cheaper and more convenient. And when stored safely harddrives will last longer than DVD±R, on which the information is stored in a layer of inevitably decaying organic chemicals.

Some people like to create a parchive from the .iso-image as well. It's more like a matter of taste I think.



You create dvdisaster recovery information from an iso image. The image is not mounted, because dvdisaster doesn't even care what the filesystem and the individual files look like, it essentially just creates ecc data for the entire raw image (similar to what Quickpar would do if you created a parchive from the image). You can create the image by either ripping it from an already burned cd, or by creating it before burning.

Yeah, (assuming RS02 mode):

• create an ISO image
• "create" the ecc data with dvdisaster. The rest free space on the would-be-disc is used for the recovery data which is then appended to the ISO image as a second session
• burn that ISO image

dvdisaster will take care of all necessary settings and calculations in the background, it will always use up the space that would be left on the DVD±R if the ISO image was burned without the ECC part. IMHO that's dvdisaster's major advantage over Quickpar, where you would have to calculate the right PAR2 file sizes for a maximum possible redundancy yourself for every DVD. The alternative would be to do quick estimations, which in turn result either in failures (ISO image becomes too big for a single layer DVD±R) or some megabytes being wasted that could otherwise be used for error correction code. When backing up to 35 DVD±Rs you can imagine what a PITA that causes, it was hard enough for me to decide, re-organize and split my data into pieces of ~3000MiB sets that would still be accessible directly from DVD (no split RAR archvies used or something like that) while not having to play DJing when I want to access consecutive data sets.

I backed up my collection on DVD. So far I've used up 117 DVDs at about 4.2gb of Flacs on a DVD. I think I'm going to buy a 1TB HD for a second backup. It's a lot easier to reload your tunes from a HD than doing it from DVDs. As in my case right now 117 times from the DVDs.