backups

[arethinn]

I feel like I should know this but that my brain is just extra dumb at this moment.

I want to back up my hard drive on DVD but both Nero BackItUp and Microsoft's Backup (rightly) complain that E: has only about 20 MB on it, I assume since the disc is not formatted. Surely there should be some way to handle this without having to DirectCD format the thing. I am just drawing a blank.

Comments

[ex-fluff.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'm going to assume you might have either Windows 2000/Me/XP. Did you try disc space compression yet? If not, try that, then try Nero.

[twopiearr.livejournal.com]

if it's a -R rather than a -RW you shouldn't need to do that. If it's an -RW, your primary disc burning software (rather than a backup program per se) should have an "erase media" command that should tackle this.

[arethinn]

They're -R discs. I agree that I shouldn't need to but clearly I am missing something, because both programs give me errors that amount to "that drive is not ready, please insert a disc".

[arethinn]

Um, why would I want to compress my hard drive? It's not that I'm running out of space (~22 out of 80GB), I just want a backup. It would never fit on a single disc and I'm not trying to do that, I want it to split across the 5 discs or so it should take. (Nero I think even says "This backup will take 5 discs" which implies to me that it knows how to split)