Just finished saying it was too good to be true...

[Loose rivets]

And it was.

Fantastic! says I, format DVD and copy to it like a stick. Go back a step.


Having given up on saving photos from corrupt H-disc, mainly because I'd found various directories with thousands of photos on the new drive and decided they'd have to do...I then set about copying to DVDs.

All went perfectly - testing the DVD pictures from time to time. I then got near to full capacity - some 200 MB to spare. I was very careful about this. Then the DVD couldn't be read. :ugh: X a thousand.

When I first copied to the DVD, it had to close in a way that it could be read. Having added to it tonight, does it need some spare space to prepare it for future use, again. ie did I not leave enough space on the DVD?

[Jofm5]

Not knowing what your original problem was or what your trying to do.... its a little ambiguous.

You have a corrupt harddisk of which some photos are salvegable and you want to copy to dvd and are having trouble ?

You have a known good source of photos but when the dvd is near full it fails ?

You keep writing to the dvd over multiple sessions and in the last session it all went tits up ?

If you can be a bit more explicit in what your trying to achieve, why and how its gone wrong it should give us the info to help you more.

As a rule of thumb - dont keep opening sessions on dvd's or cd's, they are not so resillient as HD's and can prove a huge pain. Personally I use even the rw mediums as a once only use - treat it like that and you wont go far wrong.

If you are trying to slavage valuable photos, do it in reasonable sized chunks and move what you have - once checked - file the disk and start on another - the cost of the medium vs value of what your storing dictates how to do this.

It is worth remembering that if a file is corrupt it can give the appearence of a corrupt disk, so if you copy a corrupt file to a disk and it blindly copies it then it can make the destination disk appear corrupt too. If you think your experiencing this narrow it down to file that is the problem if you can.

It may be worthing using something like winzip etc which may ignore/correct these defects and create a zipfile of the whole lot without corruption.

Again, if you can let us know what your trying to do and why - we should be able to advise your further.

[Loose rivets]

You have a known good source of photos but when the dvd is near full it fails ?

You keep writing to the dvd over multiple sessions and in the last session it all went tits up ?


That sums it up perfectly.

All seemed to go well until the last folder was copped. About five copy sessions with testing in between. What I didn't do was to eject the disc between sessions. This puts up a box with words to the effect, 'hang on a moment, disc is being prepared so that it can be read on other computers.'

I'd be sorry to hear the the multi-use of a DVD (I'm on W7 BTW, if that's different.) ...sorry to hear that I can't do this. Sorting the photos is greatly helped by not being bound to a single session. Sure, I can used the HD first, but that seems like cheating.:}



I talked on other threads in the last few days about the apparent loss of photos, but I seem to have millions on the new HD, and the only problem is that there not sorted as well as the lost data. So, no real problem.

However...I was just about to download Ccleaner for my Laptop, and I noticed they do a file recover utility. May give that a go just for fun. The OS on the old drive is really @$^@^ed. And much of the data is unreadable, so I'm assuming a ceremonial dumping of the drive as the only safe long term procedure.

[Jofm5]

RW sessions on a dvd is very dependent upon the quality of the medium used which is why multi-session is to be avoided.

IIRC one laser is used for read and one for write, this is altering the physical characteristics of the surface layer of the medium. So dependent on medium quality, laser* quality you have a very unpredicatable response - it should all work but experience going over the years is not something I would rely on or practice especially with the cost of the medium being so cheap.

You can always mutli-write - I am not saying dont, but your putting your hands in economical technology. If you pay more for the medium and the hardware you will more than likely get more predicatable results. Which is why most people stick to write once read many mediums for external disks.

Have you tried copying all bar the one folder to one dvd and the rest to the next ? - you have to be careful when writing files to a disk as it can be misleading on storage capacity. For example:.....

If you have 1024 files that are 1 byte in size you would think it would take 1024 bytes to store on a disk. However if you are using a FAT32 disk the minmum unit of a file size is 32k so a 1 byte file will occupy 32k so the total storage spaced required will be 1024x32k.

The point of the above is that if your storing hundreds of files, whilst it may appear that the space consumed is less than 4.3gb that the total required storage space given the sector sizes of the dvd is more than that. Rather than go into the details of storage and how it is done - either compress into one big file or multiple big files with winzip or equivalent or spread it over many disks.

The other thing to try of course if it is not the storage being the problem is copy what you have validated to one disk - close of the session and you have that secure - start the next disk and if you repeatidly fail on the last folder it will be a corruption there somewhere so either write off the whole directory or identify which file is lost by copying a file at a time till it fails, it can be long and laborious but it depends how much the contents are worth to you.

[green granite]

My thought is the same as Jofm5 on this, the cost of a DVD is so small that I don't bother to try and fill it right up, if it was say 4GB I'd assemble the photos into a 3.5GB file and burn it in one go.

[Loose rivets]

I think there was above 200MB showing in Properties and I checked it very carefully each time I copied a folder (with many sub-folders) to it. It tested okay each time except for the last one.

There's something nice about data all being in one place. Some-thing singular. I agree there are lots of reasons to use more discs.

My next go seemed to be okay - I pulled the disc several times letting that message come and go. I left about 1.5 Gig spare.

In haste, cos I'm running Recuver on the duff HD...just for fun.

[Jofm5]

When you do file properties it will give you the size and (size on disk) which is accurate - but only accurate to the disk the files are on and the file system in use on that disk - its a bit of a bugger like that as your destination e.g. dvd may be different.

[Loose rivets]

Yes, shoulder room is important I guess.

I have a pal that was dispatched to Japan in the 60s or early 70s. Something was wrong with a large blue machine. A hard-disk was filling up very quickly, and nothing advised the system (The OS ) that it was full. Size of drive. 10 MB.

BTW I spelled Recuva wrong above.


03:29 here. Over and out. Thanks for the help.

R

[BOAC]

The other 'gotcha' is the quality (or lack of) in DVD disks. There is lots about this on the internet. I have some 'Samsung' labelled disks that are actually de-lamintaing with 'bubbles' of gas you can push around the recording surface - and I have not even used them yet! It seems the 'manufacturers name' on the disk may not be genuine, from what I have seen.

[John Marsh]

It seems the 'manufacturers name' on the disk may not be genuine, from what I have seen.Often it isn't. A good, free tool for finding out who really made a given CD or DVD is |MG| Nero DiscSpeed 4.11.2.0 Download (http://majorgeeks.com/Nero_DiscSpeed_d118.html)
Just open the 'Disc Info' tab.

After reading comments at the Club CDFreaks forum and burning piles of optical discs myself, I would recommend discs by Mitsubishi Chemicals, Taiyo Yuden, Verbatim and Sony's Indian subcontractor (Daxon).

Online retailer SVP Online - SVP (http://www.svp.co.uk) is clued-in re. the importance of manufacturer ID and state it in their item listings.

This is only a guide, from a non-expert! Results with your drive(s) may vary. Mine are Lite-On (desktops) and LG (laptop).

[Mike-Bracknell]

Just don't put anything on any Tesco branded CD/DVDs you might want to keep.

[Loose rivets]

'Samsung' labelled disks that are actually de-lamintaing with 'bubbles' of gas you can push around the recording surface -

That's frightening. Who can you trust these days? Going by John's post, a recommendation by folk that have researched it goes a long way.


I seem to have 50 Sony that were on special, and most of 50 of the one I used: Memorex. I feel sure that it was trying to fill it that was the problem.

I used a Kodak for the next go. Wasn't thinking much about a big name letting me down, but so far so good...refresh every five years max., would seem appropriate.

[BOAC]

Just to make clear, LR - it is not the 'big names' letting you down as far as I know - it is the people printing 'big names' on crap disks.

As an example, I luckily avoided (via Google) buying quantity '64GB Sony flash drives' on Ebay from China. Turns out they are AT BEST 500mb drives repackaged in 64GB 'Sony blister packs'.

Cue your thread title.......................

[Bushfiva]

Recordable DVDs for backup. Hmmm. After a few years of religiously tracking the best brands and best drives, etc., I gave up on them a while back and simply back up to hard drive now. From memory, which was current as of about 2 years ago:

All things being equal, DVD+R is a much better standard (by design), for high-speed recording (which all recording is now), and is way better for multi-session usage if you're mad enough to go down that path.

Recovering data is easier from a bad single-layer DVD than a bad dual-layer DVD. It's easier from DVD+R than DVD-R.

The dye used in a recordable media contributes to the overall quality. First-generation cyanine has a life of around 5 - 10 years, as a chemical. Second-generation is around 50 years. Azo is maybe 60 years. The resulting media has a life from 1 - 60 years.

On recordable CDs, you can tell what the dye is by looking at the reflected color of the disk. You can't do that with DVD since most of the manufacturers have worked hard to make the colors look the same.

In the past, Taiyo Yuden has either sold complete media or dye to companies such as Fuji, Maxell (Hitachi), Sony, TDK. Unfortunately, those companies also buy from other sources.

For best quality at the highest speed, the DVD drive looks at the brand and other details of the DVD, and checks that against its internal write strategy table. If there's a valid entry, the drive will use that to write to the disc. If there's no entry, it defaults to a standard-low-speed write strategy which should work with all discs. When you buy off-brand or no-brand discs, they will contain strategy information that is "fake" in that it will claim to be, say, a TDK of a certain type. When you use disc ID software, then you believe the manufacturer is trying to mislead you, but in reality the manufacturer is telling the DVD drive what write strategy will give the best results. It's not as important now since the market has matured, but up to a couple of years ago it was useful to keep the drive firmware up to date, since the write strategy tables get added to and revised from time to time.

All things being equal, the best recordable CD should have way longer life than the best recordable DVD because of the dye available to CD. In reality, the recording layer on a CDR is protected only by laquer, whereas on a DVDR it is protected by another 0.6mm layer of polycarbonate.

Some of the "best" DVDRs are no longer made because they weren't profitable.

And all of the above is why I stopped archiving to DVDs and CDs.

[Loose rivets]

So, my box of photies...some 100 lbs in weight, wasn't such a bad idea then?:uhoh:


Oh, BTW, that 100 lbs was after I'd thrown out a mass of rubbish. After 33 years in one house, I'd allotted a couple of hours for sorting. Five years later.........:hmm:

[John Marsh]

The Memorex DVDs I have tried were a bit 'hit & miss'; actually made by CMC Magnetics, a mediocre source. LR, you might want to check who made your discs.

Kodak, surprisingly, allow their name on packs of DVDs which are made in China by Umedisc, another lower-quality make. I have had failures with these; the 'value' packs from Tesco are the same make. The manufacturer ID on my Umedisc Kodaks is AML. Lesson learned.

Maxell-branded discs can be Ritek, which is a lesser make and a guarantee of at least 1 dud per pack of 10; or Taiyo Yuden, which is highly regarded.

Blank DVD media tests: Blank DVD Media Tests - Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power (http://club.cdfreaks.com/f76/) More useful info here: Blank Media - Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power (http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/)

Bushfiva: Interesting info on 'fake' ID codes; thanks. FWIW, the aforementioned SVP Online - SVP (http://www.svp.co.uk) have a good reputation with the Club CD freaks people, with regard to selling genuine Mitsubishi, Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim discs.

I have found the Tesco-sold Sony DVDs in black, white & blue packs to be good; also their green Sony CD packs. Verbatim DVDs from PC World are reliable.