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How to backup my CD-ROM Movie Collection
I just bought a new DVDROM-RW writer. I'm trying to backup my CD-ROM collection but the backup software I'm using is saying that there not enough room on my 4.7 GB DVD blank disks. Do I need to compress the movies before backing them up or what? Is there any good software that simplifies this process?
Help!
Help!
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Actually, it's not a scam - it has to do with the way that your computer thinks about numbers. Since PC's are forced to think in binary mode, and all of their data addressing is set in that mode, you can't give a PC a decimal addressing scheme. IOW, you can't give a PC 1000 addresses, you have to give it 1024, because 1000 isn't a power of 2, but 1024 is. Just like a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and a Mb is 1024 kilobytes(or 1024^2 bytes), a GB is 1024 Mb ( or 1024 ^3 bytes). So when a DVD (or a harddisk for that matter) is rated at a certain capacity in GB, you can multiply that by 1024^3 to get the actual number of bytes the drive has in total storage.
Now here's the kicker:
Unfortunately, you can't have all that space. You lose it because of the way PC's address physical storage space. First you lose a goodly chunk to the File Allocation Table (under FAT and FAT32) or to the MFT (under NTFS).
second, you lose space because your PC does address indivudual bytes of storage. It addresses storage space in sectors and clusters, which have a set size (which depends on which OS you have, the size of the partitions on the storage media and some other factors.) If a file is more than that set size, it spans across the clusters, filling them up one at a time, until it's all written on the disk. However, since files are rarely exactly x number of clusters in length, and no more than one file can use a cluster at one time, you end up with some empty space at the end of that last cluster. This is called slack space, and can make a difference in how much you can actually store on a disk. If you have Windows 2000 you can even see this difference for yourself:
Right click on a file (not a shortcut or folder) and choose properties
Compare the lines that say Size: and Size on disk:
I did this just now on a URL file and got the following results
Size: 134 bytes
Size on disk: 4.00kb (4096 bytes)
So I lost 3964 bytes that I simply cannot use. Now I have something like 2,000 or so favorites on my PC - this translates into about 7.5 Mb of lost space.
While I doubt this rambling dissertation is actually going to answer your question, hopefully it does explain why you can't put 4700 MB of data on a DVD.
Jzal
Now here's the kicker:
Unfortunately, you can't have all that space. You lose it because of the way PC's address physical storage space. First you lose a goodly chunk to the File Allocation Table (under FAT and FAT32) or to the MFT (under NTFS).
second, you lose space because your PC does address indivudual bytes of storage. It addresses storage space in sectors and clusters, which have a set size (which depends on which OS you have, the size of the partitions on the storage media and some other factors.) If a file is more than that set size, it spans across the clusters, filling them up one at a time, until it's all written on the disk. However, since files are rarely exactly x number of clusters in length, and no more than one file can use a cluster at one time, you end up with some empty space at the end of that last cluster. This is called slack space, and can make a difference in how much you can actually store on a disk. If you have Windows 2000 you can even see this difference for yourself:
Right click on a file (not a shortcut or folder) and choose properties
Compare the lines that say Size: and Size on disk:
I did this just now on a URL file and got the following results
Size: 134 bytes
Size on disk: 4.00kb (4096 bytes)
So I lost 3964 bytes that I simply cannot use. Now I have something like 2,000 or so favorites on my PC - this translates into about 7.5 Mb of lost space.
While I doubt this rambling dissertation is actually going to answer your question, hopefully it does explain why you can't put 4700 MB of data on a DVD.
Jzal
Just try removing some data/movies so it fits your dvd.
Or you'll just buy a new dvd? :)