DLA for an Idiot (me)

[seacue]

I recently took delivery of a new Dell Vostro 230 at a place where I volunteer (keeping their computers running). Years ago I wrote a program which outputs data backup to a CD-RW formatted by DLA [Drive Letter Access]. That is on an ancient machine which runs XP with Roxio 5 (something) and formats the CD-RW using Direct CD.

There is a newer PC at that office also running XP and Roxio (forget which version) which has the disk formatting cleverly hidden as an option under Drag-to-Disk. My program can write backups on that system.

I have an even newer Vostro 200 PC at home running Roxio Creator 9. It too allows formetting with DLA if one finds the option in Drag-to-Disk. Yes, I can write backup from my program on that system.

In early June we received a Vostro 230 running XP Pro. It has Roxio Creator DE 10.3. After lots of thrashing around and two on-line sessions with Dell support, I can't find Drag-to-Disk or any other way to format with DLA nor to write from my program to an already-formatted DLA CD-RW.

What have I done wrong? I have uninstalled and reinstalled Roxio Creator DE 10.3. I've probably done other things before I realized that the formatting command was hidden behind Drag-to-Disk. My latest effort was a system restore to about the day I unpacked the PC from its box. Nothing helps.

HELP!!

[Mike-Bracknell]

The short version: DLA. Drive Letter Access. UDF packet writing software for CD/DVD. (http://www.argentuma.com/backup/software/dla.html)

The long version: Don't do backups with writeable CDs/DVDs if you intend the backup to be unique or available for a long period after it's written. You'll come to find that CDRs vary considerably in their quality and hence the length of time you can expect to retrieve data from it. There's also a considerable difference in burning and reading powers of various CD/DVD writers to consider as well. Be careful!

[seacue]

Thanks. I previously downloaded those. IIRC, the "IBM" one says that it is an upgrade and one needs DLA to already be present. The "Dell" one says that it is a preproduction release and dire consequences are possible. I'll investigate the "IBM" version more fully. I wouldn't dare put the "Dell" one on a critical production machine.

I do NOT rely on on the CD-RW backup over the long term. It came in handy once when I was laid up in the hospital and the non-computer-savy employee could use my backup system to produce a CD-RW of January 1, 2007 data.

My normal backup scheme manually produces a backup on flash drive, a network transfer to another computer and two copies of the backup on CD-R. One of the CD-R copies is kept off-site. So there are five (5) copies of every backup.

Yesterday I enhanced my backup program (in C) to automatically write a flash drive. Each of these backups includes the date in the file name (automatically), so multiple backups can be made to the same medium without earlier versions being overwritten.

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[seacue]

The problem appears to have been solved.

I uninstalled Roxio Creator 10.3 which came with the new computer. I then installed Roxio Creator 9 instead. It seems to do all the needed DLA things fine. I have two older machines successfully running "9".

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