Any way to support DVD+R burnt in multisession? (TAO)

Well, if Nero and Brasero's method are "proprietary" (in the sense the latter is documented, but not set as standard), both give good results and I had no trouble swapping DVD+Rs between at leat 6 completely different machines (Win2000, Ubuntu 7.04 through 9.04, Win XP, Nero, CDBurnerXP, Brasero); I could continue a session in Nero on a DVD+R started in Brasero with no trouble. More like a +de facto+ standard, like the .doc text format.

Of course Retrospect cannot be used for what I want...unfortunately. Isn't a standard available to write incrementally on UDF formatted DVD+R in a way it can be both burnt and read on any platform?

If such a standard is not available for BD-R media, with 25GB available, the problem will only grow worse when these media will hit a competitive price.

As a side note, does a classifying system exist to keep track of heterogenous contents on a disc, allowing it to be easily placed and retrieved in a binder, like the Dewey system used in most libraries? I could design my own, but I don't wish to reinvent the wheel if a more refined system exists somewhere.

I get these from tigerdirect.ca, which is not the cheapest vendor, but not the most expensive either, so provides a good mean estimate of the current prices. Of course, I do factor taxes in the cost.

Agree, it's more like 16¢ a GB now. This one, for example: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=437683 9&CatId=4230

I voluntarily avoided the Seagate Agent series, since I read numerous reports of overheating or failing very early. Even if I did include them, the cost hovers around 12¢ a GB. It's not really difficult to understand why I avoid any unreliability in such a critical part as backup is.

Disk spanning itself was not particularly tedious; I burnt everything sequentially in a given category, and stopped at the end of it, and wrote the date of the most recent file in the set. Typically, the last DVD+R wasn't full, and I could carry on writing another session, simply by looking for files created or modified after the date wrote on the disk.

Of course DVD+Rs have their trade-offs, the main one being their bulk (for transport, I don't measure them by date, but by weight and size: around 15 kilograms!); for rarely-accessed backups, I don't consider this a serious issue

Since Windoes and Ubuntu are both able to read all the sessions on these DVD+Rs without even one of said softwares to be installed, I consider this a Mac OS X issue. sorry.

I will, but in the meantime, I would like to be able not to see backups on Mac OS X as a hurdle, and still, not to be forced to use cumbersome solutions such as an emulated ISOBuster.

Well, it was said to burn DVD+Rs that will be incompatible with Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac where Retrospect is not installed. It is pretty much useless to me if that is true.

{quote:title=Scott Radloff wrote:}
If I understand the direction of your questions and where this thread has so far gone, you aren't referring so much to backup, but rather to file archival. Is this assumption closer to the truth?{quote}

Well, for me it's almost the same, as an end-user point of view.

{quote}If so, you wish to use optical media to minimize your cost of storage, but you want to have the ability to burn in multiple sessions so that you can optimize your use of the space provided by the media. Am I still on the right track?{quote}
Yes, and to save some physical space and weight.

{quote} I think Király probably has the right of this; you don't see support for multi-session burns because of licensing issues. It is for this same reason that we do not (yet) have support for Bluray.{quote}I knew that for BluRay; it's known that it's a licensing nightmare that Apple want to get simplified before jumping. But still, other manufacturer happen to sell cheaper machines (but not better 😉 with a BluRay drive inside, so in absolute terms, it's possible for Apple to include it if they really wanted to.
Same goes for multisession; assuming it's licensed, then Ubuntu surely haven't paid for that licence, but still supports it. Same goes for DVD reading, wich is not supposed to be supported in any free (as in speech) software, although it is.
It's still different in the case of multisession DVD from BluRay; although BR drives are available, they're not mainstream, and that may be a reason not to have them. But multisession ISO and UDF DVD+Rs are ubiquitous since Nero 5 (not sure before that, since I haven't any DVD+RW drive). UDF packet writing is still proprietary, on the other hand.

{quote}In any case, it just doesn't exist in the environment in which you wish to work (OS X). So, what to do? As in everything, work with the OS. In this case, it means taking advantage of Burn Folders. Simply populate a Burn Folder with the files you wish to archive. When you have enough to fill your media, burn away normally, without having to use multiple sessions. This is a simple solution.{quote}
I have a hard time telling myself I must forget about the old saves, and must simply use pirated ISOBuster under Darwine to read them, or burn them again in one session on a new DVD+R; in the first case it's obvious why I strongly dislike the solution, and in the latter, I lose all the DVD+R's economical advantage.

I may be interested in an ISOBuster-like solution for the Mac, by the way, as long as the sofware doesn't rely on OS X framework, but have its own whenever disks are deemed unreadable by the Finder.

Presently, I do mainly use burn folders to fill them up, but my way of doing things means I have tens of half-full burn folders that await completion to be burned. And all these folders really clog up my external hard drives (Internal one is far too small), the reason why I ask about another classifying method suitable for disparate contents on an optical disk, instead of the simple "one category-one or x DVD+Rs". Having everything on external hard drives is inconvenient, since it's not easy to change some minor content in it and keep the change visible when the drive is unplugged and put away (on an optical disk, it's simple to directly write on it, and file it in a binder - There's no such thing as hard drive binders 😉


{quote}In the meantime, your originals will be backed up by Time Machine. Since they are made redundant by the technology built into OS X, you need not be concerned with manually making a "backup" of these files while they reside in a not-yet-burned Burn Folder. Once the folder has been burned, the files will be archived, they can be deleted from your hard drive, and the redundant Time Machine copies will eventually expire and go away.{quote}
I agree that backing up often is not the concern it used to be, since TM requires no intervention. I don't backup my external hard drives in Time Machine for economical reasons. When I bought the TM drive, it was around $150 for 500GB, on which I kept 10GB for OS X install discs images, 20GB for externally-installed OS X (mainly for debugging, since that unibody is not very reliable), 100GB for "spare" partition I use for urgent file transfer when another drive is not available or to test interoperability with Ubuntu. The remaining 370GB is for Time Machine.

I think solutions similar to Time Machine do exist: for example, it would be perfect fit if TM both backed up on external hard drive AND provided an option to ask for a DVD+R and burn it in a cross-compatible format each time a fixed amount of data is reached, or whenever TM partition is full. That way, limited space on a TM partition wouldn't be an issue any more, and if one wanted an older backup than TM could provide, TM would ask user to insert DVD+R for that date range. Of course, it would still be easier to get bigger hard drives where economical.

In any case, I believe this problem will be solved by itself when hard drives hit a 9 to 10¢-per-GB in a year or so, and that DVD+R will no longer be economical... Until BD-R hardware and software becomes competitively priced.