Easy Archive seems impossible

[Yendor]

I am so trying to get EMC 9 to do something right so that I can say I got at least a dime's worth out of the product. After mothballing it because I couldn't practically author my DVD's with it, I pulled it out because I want to backup my home movies to DVD as data files. That can't be hard can it? It just has to right a bunch of files to the disk, no codecs, no special video cards, no bleeding edge processor needed. But go figure, they found a way to make me stumble again.

 

I'm using Easy Archive. I just want to take a big folder full of movies and copy them across however many DVD's it takes. I must say that using it was...well...easy. I point it at the directory and tell it to go. It tells me I'll need 4 more disks...thank you, I appreciate that. It creates disk 1 and tells me to put in another...great. Then disk 2, then disk 3. Oops, on disk 4 it says it encountered an error on the disk. Put in another disk and click "retry". So, I put in another disk and click retry...it works, and when finished tells me that disk 1 is finished, now put in disk 2. WHAT!!! I checked the data on the disk and sure enough, it restarted the whole backup from the very beginning because that one disk was bad.

 

I am now bald as a result of this experience, however, I'm hoping somebody can tell me what I've done wrong or if I've done it right and there's a patch.

 

Darn it, this Roxio is like punishment for something.

[james_hardin]

Those of us that have been burning for many years, know that disc spanning and other voodoo tricks like that don't work!

 

Do your own projects limiting them manually and it will never fail, or in the worst case, you might lose One disc. In a 'set' of disc, failure of one can result in losing the entire set…

 

I usually use Explorer. I set up a bunch of empty folders, disc1, disc2, disc3, etc. then copy less than 4.3gb to each folder. It may be a little harder this way but it seems to never fail.

 

Then use Creator Classic to make the burns.

[Yendor]

Those of us that have been burning for many years, know that disc spanning and other voodoo tricks like that don't work!

 

Why do you say that?

[gi7omy]

Why do you say that?

 

Bitter experience in the majority of cases really. The problem with spanning is if anything happens to one disc, the whole set is trashed - even a scratch can take out the lot with no hope of recovery.

 

Add to that that disc spanning is fragile to start with

[Yendor]

Bitter experience in the majority of cases really. The problem with spanning is if anything happens to one disc, the whole set is trashed - even a scratch can take out the lot with no hope of recovery.

 

Add to that that disc spanning is fragile to start with

 

So, manually dividing my files into disk sized jobs is reliable, but having an application do it is fragile. Hmmmm...

[james_hardin]

The uninformed always think it is easy…

 

You sit down and write the code to make it happen. About your 10th re-write you will begin to understand that it is a lot harder than it first appeared. By now you will have a full week into it and nothing to show for it…

[Yendor]

The uninformed always think it is easy…

 

You sit down and write the code to make it happen. About your 10th re-write you will begin to understand that it is a lot harder than it first appeared. By now you will have a full week into it and nothing to show for it…

 

You're right. Programming systems and firmware for over 20 years hardly qualifies me. What an idiotic thing for me to think that Roxio can do what MS-DOS backup did 20 years ago.

 

So, is there anybody (perhaps Roxio themselves) that can stand behind this simple feature and tell me if I'm missing something or is the Roxio software really that plainly silly that it can't retry the job for the disk that I was on when it failed instead of restarting all the way from the beginning?

[gi7omy]

Allow me to let you into a secret - the DOS backup from 20 years ago was flaky back then (and still is now)

 

Anything that spans disks (or discs if you aren't using floppies) is akin to playing Russian roulette with your data

[grandpabruce]

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Someone just doesn't get it.

[james_hardin]

You're right. Programming systems and firmware for over 20 years hardly qualifies me. What an idiotic thing for me to think that Roxio can do what MS-DOS backup did 20 years ago.

 

So, is there anybody (perhaps Roxio themselves) that can stand behind this simple feature and tell me if I'm missing something or is the Roxio software really that plainly silly that it can't retry the job for the disk that I was on when it failed instead of restarting all the way from the beginning?

27 years myself…

 

Yes you are qualified, so go ahead and write a program that will make a spanned disc set that is 100% stable and each disc is fully independent and none of it relies on any specific operating system or is dependant on any recovery program. Go for it!

 

Yes I remember the useless world of DOS Backup! I wasted many hours feeding 5 1/4" floppies to make my backups. I recall wasting 2 hours feeding it floppies only to find that the one file I needed was "corrupt" and would not be recovered… (being DOS, if was chained to the PC and could do nothing else while I wasted my day)

 

Likewise a few years latter I found that all of the DOS 2.x backups we made were unusable on DOS 6.x… Those discs were also unusable because of the special format for Backup, so I wasted more hours formatting them for reuse!

 

If you want to write that program, please try to set the bar a little higher than the poor example you cited!

 

Now the achieves I wrote to CD's with Roxio/Adaptec Classic under Win3.1 are fully readable and recoverable 10 years later on any PC with any OS that can read CDFS…

 

Now I have NO solution, using optical media, for a file that is too large to fit on the target media! (Of course there is no foolproof solution for that using magnetic media either)

[Yendor]

Because I know how uppity the forum monitors get, I'm trying to keep the subject on track and find out how to get the EMC 9 to do what it seems to imply...or learn if I am doing something wrong, or any other empirical or anectodal information on this EMC 9 function. It asks me to stick in a new disk and click "retry" which implies that it will retry that disk - should I be hitting a different button? Is there an option that says "on error retry backup from start"? Has anybody used this Easy Archive feature? It doesn't look like any of the files are spanned and I disabled anything I could find that implied compression or such. Of the disks that did succeed, I can successfully open the copied files right off the CDs.

 

27 years - you are crazy. You said yourself that you manually divide them into folders and "it seems to never fail". But then infer that a computer program can't divide the files into [logical] folders and do the exact same thing? You are totally whack dude.