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Copying files to a series of DVD

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Darwin:
OK. Just checked. PackEmIn is two years old and is Win2k and XP compatible. It'll cost you $7.97 and, most annoyingly, there is no trial  >:(

Chris:
I tried Burn To The Brim. This did part of what I wanted. I also tried SizeMe. Again this did part of what I wanted.

Finally I tried PackEmIn from PCMag. This was the best and seems to do everything I want.

Thanks everyone for their suggestions.

Chris

gtoal:
I want to back up a series of files to DVD. In total, there is about 20 GB of files. I want the files to be on the DVD in original format, not zipped or any other format. In the past I have just selected a group of files that would fit on a DVD and burn that, but this gets fiddly.

I have checked the forum discussion on backups but none of the programs seem to do this.

Is there a program that will allow one to select a range of files and directories, break them into DVD sized groups so that they can be burnt to DVD ( or burn directly to DVD)?
-Chris (September 07, 2008, 08:19 PM)
--- End quote ---

that takes me back... many years ago, Acorn had a floppy archiver called "far" which was basically tar for floppies.  But it suffered from the deficiencies that you're complaining about.  So Pieter Schoenmakers and I came up with Far Two which did a first-fit algorithm on files to pack as much content into floppies as possible.  Remarkably, the first-fit heuristic was incredibly effective.  Anyway, the code is still around ( http://www.gtoal.com/src/fart/fart.c.html ) although clearly it's specific to the Acorn RiscOS; but it might give you some hints about what's needed if you want to write something similar to create staging directories for copying to CD or DVD...

One thing you need to be careful about is the overhead caused by the directory hierarchy which you're creating, which adds to the expected size that you'ld think you needed from just the file sizes alone.  And of course remember to account for block sizes.  Probably for a DVD imager, you'd want to make a rough guess first and then create an iso, and maybe iterate a few times adding or removing the last few Kbs to the files until you get a perfect fit.  If your system is fast enough to allow that and you don't do it too often...

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