Backing up on DVD-R

[afarber]

Just wanted some quick opinions. I don't really have the extra harddrive space to back up my H140. I have a DVD burner on my Mac, but not on my WinXP PC. Has anyone tried backing up this way? Anyone know if burning with a Mac will make for strange files/structure that may not work right once reloaded onto my H140 (if need be)? I really like using the DB mode, so I would need the files and their tags to remain intact.

I know there are very few Mac users here, but I thought I'd give it a try. Thanks so much!

[necroGL]

yea it should work as the CD burner on my mates powerbook works fine and makes CD's which read on both so i dont know how a DVD will be different

remember the Filesystem is just how data is stored it doesn't change the data itself

[Phisi Leonidas]

I'm not a MAC user and no burning pro myself, but you should check if the burning program supports the 'Joliet'-extension format.
I think Macs burn with the 'Rockridge'-extension by default which comes with some restrictions to filenames.
With 'Joliet' the DVD should be readable by a PC as well and writing the content back shouldn't be no problem in any case.

[boneyfrog]

If your file structure maintains the 52 char path/name DB limit there should be no problems burning it, as long as you burn the dvd with the joliet <sp?> file structure and use no compression it wont be a problem. If they are not and you need to put the files into an archive avoid using stuff it, that can and more than likely will have strange out puts when you extract it under windows instead make either a tarball, .rar or .zip archive and burn that to the dvd.

If you are a maschocist you could allways set the dvd burner as a shared drive and try to get windows to see it as a writeable media and burn it that way but make sure you creat a md5 check sum of what you are burning and compare that to the dvd to make sure that you are not dropping bits across the network due to windows.

[afarber]

Thanks for your replies! The joliet tip is important, and something I hadn't thought of. All my files are under 52 characters on my player, so that shouldn't be a problem.

I'll let you know how it goes (though I don't really see myself doing it this week).