Toast 12 Data And Or Photo

[robroy64]

Getting ready to burn my 1^st Blu-ray disc. I am using Toast 12 Titanium on my Mac with Yosemite 10.10.1.

I have approximately 10GB of material consisting of (3) versions of 2200 old family pictures in an iPhoto library that have been edited, same pictures un-edited versions and the original JPEG scans.

 

I want to make the discs readable for both PC & Mac. It’s a present for the grand kids. Thinking they will be able to transfer it in the future when there is a new media available.

 

*Do I make a photo disc and a data disc for them to be able to view the pictures on their PC machines and Blu-ray players?

 

*Should it be done on an M disc for permanent archival purposes?

 

*Also getting ready to buy compatible and appropriate Blu-ray burner for this project any suggestions?

 

Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated thanx

[tsantee]

There are so many options here. You want Blu-ray players connected to HDTVs to play the photos. Many Blu-ray players can play data discs but I'm thinking they either need to be formatted as DVD-Rom (UDF) or ISO 9660 (which is the PC format Toast uses). I suggest experimenting with standard DVD media to see what works with your Blu-ray player. Both Macs & PCs can read from DVD-Rom (UDF) format so that's where I'd start.

 

Since you don't already have a Blu-ray disc burner and only have 10 GB of photos to burn, I suggest burning to 3 standard or 2 DL DVD discs instead. I'm not certain of the lifespan of burned Blu-ray discs. I know of standard DVD discs that become unreadable over time. You also might consider copying the photos to a USB flash drive. My Blu-ray player has USB inputs and can read .jpg photos from a PC-formatted flash drive (which is how they are formatted when you buy them).

[robroy64]

Thanx Tsantee, I have a relatively new 27” iMac. As you know it no longer has a disc drive built in so I will need to get an external disc burner anyway.

Will the (UDF) format work for a Blu-Ray disc as well?

After I finish this project I want to back up several other libraries (picture & sound) totaling over 250 GB. Then I would like to backup my whole system including all of the external hard drives filled with Pro tools and SketchUp files, so I thought long term I would get good use of a Blu-ray burner?

Is Toast 12 good for Back-ups? After an initial entire BU will an update BU in 2 months just update the new files and changes or will it need to make a completely new BU from scratch?

Thanx just earning my Newbie status. I have only used Toast years ago to burn cd's.

[tsantee]

Yes, UDF format works for Blu-ray discs too. Toast has a disc spanning feature when burning Mac only or Mac & PC in which it keeps asking for new discs after filling up the previous one. The risk is that a burn fails somewhere along the line requiring you to start a new spanning session approximately where the last one left off. With spanning Toast writes a directory file to each disc to help in searching for files. This feature doesn't keep track of incremental changes so you'd need to do a complete set again if you want to update it later.

 

If you use rewritable Blu-ray discs there also is a feature called Dynamic Writing where the Blu-ray disc is formatted so it can be like a hard drive with files added and deleted. I don't think that would work with disc spanning but I don't know.

 

Toast used to come with an app called Get Backup which is designed for making incremental backups. Go to Macupdate.com and the Apple Store to search for backup applications to see if one of them is better for backing up to disc than is Toast. I don't know. I used to use Retrospect but rarely backup to disc any more.