Disc Spanning without file splitting?

[Richard at LGP]

I work with a professional photographer, and after each shoot, I archive all the raw camera files to 2 sets of DVD's. There are over a thousand of these small (15MB) files for each day of shooting. When Toast 7 introduced Disc Spanning, it saved me lots of time since I no longer had to try to fit the maximum number of files on to a disc manually. When I upgraded to Toast 8 however, I noticed that these small files were getting spanned. I've had nothing but trouble with larger files that have been spanned in the past, so I definitely don't want this happening.

 

Is there any way to prevent this happening? Maybe a preference could be added to turn this off, or a threshold value (e.g.: Span files larger than 200MB)? I've gone back to Toast 7 for now.

 

My thanks to whomever can help with this.

[dbabbage]

Here are the specifics:

-Application Bundles are not split when below 20MB

-Files are not split under 10MB

-Files are not split at the end of a disc when they take up less than 5% of the disc's space

I have never seen these criteria before. Can you clarify what the last item means? If a file is not split when it takes up less than 5% of a disc's space, does this mean that no file under about 240Mb will be split on a DVD+R? (i.e. 5% of 4.7Gb)

 

ETA: I am aware that Toast 9 has implemented a "no split" feature. I just want to be finally able to use Toast 8 for the first time, if I can actually be confident it is not going to use proprietary splitting techniques that will be no good when operating systems and hardware change, and the Roxio Restore application no longer functions.

[Richard at LGP]

Yes, but is there any way to prevent the splitting altogether?

[sjkrox]

I am sure I am not the only user who would like the option of having files not split at all. This would be very convenient for some purposes.

One purpose I'd have for this would be to keep original EyeTV MPEG-2 Transport Stream recordings from being split across disks so playback can be done directly from a single disk.

[Syth]

This really needs to be a preference that we can turn off.

 

No comments on this?

[DavidB]

Here are the specifics:

-Application Bundles are not split when below 20MB

-Files are not split under 10MB

-Files are not split at the end of a disc when they take up less than 5% of the disc's space

 

I am sure I am not the only user who would like the option of having files not split at all. This would be very convenient for some purposes.

 

When spanned files are restored, whether they are split or not, their modification dates are changed to the current day. In the case of backup DVDs, if files are not split, they can simply be dragged to the Desktop to recover them. This preserves their modification dates. The only other solution I have found is to drag the split parts to the Desktop and then join them using the CAT command in Terminal, but this is not very convenient, especially for users who are unfamiliar with Terminal.

 

Thank you,

 

David

[johnnysteed]

Am I wrong or doesn't this do the same thing as Toast, i.e., it splits folders (and files?) instead of keeping them together?

 

David

 

It doesn't split files like Toast it only rearranges files and folders, making them more easily accessible later.

[johnnysteed]

Forget about waiting on Roxio to make this basic change to their app.

 

Use Folder Splitter. It's exactly what you're looking for and it's free.

 

Folder Splitter

[freshburn]

There is no way to stop it from splitting.

[jjtiziou]

I'm going to chime in here as another user that would want an option to turn file splitting off.

 

In fact, I hadn't realized that Toast 7 (which I have a license to) had spanning at all- so I had started working with a smaller app (Impression by Babel Company, now discontinued) - As it was a small piece of software, the developer was very responsive (thanks Steve!) and implemented an option to disable file segmenting per our requests. Unfortunately, it doesn't work under 10.5 - but now that you've clued me into the fact that I might be able to do this with the Toast that I already have, there is no way that I am going to upgrade until the splitting can be turned off in v. 8....

 

I'm in the same boat as the original poster, looking to make extra backups of large volumes of digital images without worrying about having files that are split and potentially harder to access far later down the line.

 

Thanks for listening, and until you take this feedback into consideration for an update to Toast 8, I'll just go take a poke at how the spanning works in v 7...

 

-jj

 

Here are the specifics:

-Application Bundles are not split when below 20MB

-Files are not split under 10MB

-Files are not split at the end of a disc when they take up less than 5% of the disc's space

 

Also, It would definitely be great to be able to specify a threshold... for example, a lot of my files are 12mb or so- I don't care about loosing a few megs at the end of a dvd, and having random files be split is a hastle.

 

Thanks for your consideration-

 

-jj

[DavidB]

Forget about waiting on Roxio to make this basic change to their app.

 

Use Folder Splitter. It's exactly what you're looking for and it's free.

 

Folder Splitter

 

Am I wrong or doesn't this do the same thing as Toast, i.e., it splits folders (and files?) instead of keeping them together?

 

David

[Syth]

There is no way to stop it from splitting.

 

This is very disappointing. I want to burn video files onto discs so I can play them in my stand alone divx player. With Toast's insistence on splitting files, I have to burn every disc manually instead of being able to feed 20GB of files in at once and end up with a set of usable discs.

 

This really needs to be a preference that we can turn off.

[Ian Osborne]

I would go along with this option as restoring takes a lot longer than just copying the files from the disk.

 

Thirded. I recently had to send a huge quantity of relatively-small (>30MB) files over half a dozen DVDs to a Windows user. I ended up organising the discs manually as I didn't want the files to be split, where a simple checkbox which switched this option on and off would've allowed me to simply drop them into the data window.

 

Any chance of including this in 8.1?

[John at Roxio]

Here are the specifics:

-Application Bundles are not split when below 20MB

-Files are not split under 10MB

-Files are not split at the end of a disc when they take up less than 5% of the disc's space

[DavidB]

I recently had to send a huge quantity of relatively-small (>30MB) files over half a dozen DVDs to a Windows user.

 

Yes--another excellent reason to have an option not to split files.

 

David

[easternherp]

I am sure I am not the only user who would like the option of having files not split at all. This would be very convenient for some purposes.

 

When spanned files are restored, whether they are split or not, their modification dates are changed to the current day. In the case of backup DVDs, if files are not split, they can simply be dragged to the Desktop to recover them. This preserves their modification dates. The only other solution I have found is to drag the split parts to the Desktop and then join them using the CAT command in Terminal, but this is not very convenient, especially for users who are unfamiliar with Terminal.

 

Thank you,

 

David

 

I would go along with this option as restoring takes a lot longer than just copying the files from the disk.