DVD Burners

Also installed a DVD burner last weekend (TDK Indi 420N 4X). Stay away from the USB ones -- I experienced nothing but a disaster with a Buslink drive I purchased last spring. The drive went berserk when plugged into a USB 1.1 port with error messages. I never got a functional burn out of the drive (1.1 or 2.0) though the software appeared to work fine which is exactly what you don't want from backup software.

The media I purchased (and which was unreturnable) locked me into CD+RW. So I got an internal one this time. Worked like a champ, though I would have liked better software than Nero Express. I was surprised just how hard it is to keep up with the 3.3MB/sec data flow. I have a pretty speedy system but once it got to my small files (I have about 30,000 2K-10K data files) the buffer was only just sufficient to prevent a coaster. What's great about DVDs for backup is that they are readable in any new computer -- solving the dilemma of tape.

The problem is that I can find no good backup software for DVDs. Companies like NovaStor claim to support but are abysmally slow since they use packet-writing mode for their DVD writes (< 1/10 the speed of Nero). And they don't provide open file protection to make copies of open files in their low-end versions. Microsoft does provide open file protection in the Backup utility included with Windows, which is completely unusable with DVDs by design (works great as a low-end utility for tape).

So I'm using Nero for DVD backup. Every backup has to be manually done since while you can save a set of files to be backed up, you can't select directories and have all files in those directories backed up. Also, the directory processing prior to the backup takes almost an hour (the backup itself is about 12 minutes -- apparently Nero really doesn't like 55,000 files). I'd upgrade to the Nero Ultra 6 Suite which supposedly has a backup utility, but they provide no description of what I'm getting on their web site (so it probably isn't that good). True, I could download a demo.

Earth to Nero or any other consumer backup package. Build one that works well with DVDs and we will come. I have finally (just after buying a 24GB tape drive as the primary backup method; DVD is the secondary) seen the death of tape for consumers and small businesses -- a stack of DVD-RWs is extremely affordable and compatible. What would be very cool is real disaster recovery -- one bootable DVD which will reformat your computer on demand and reinstall to a fully-functional snapshot.