I have a small collection of movies (25 maybe) on my hard drive in a variety of formats: .iso, .img, .avi, .mpg, as well as VIDEO_TS folders with the regular DVD structure inside. As my digital collection grows I cannot keep them all on my hard drives. I started backing them up to disc by simply burning the source file to a data DVD+R. But, lately as I re-visit some of the movies to re-burn them I run into a few issues:
On some occasions Nero will cache the file(s) from my data disc effectively and burn the new DVD straightaway without issue. I understand this is tempting fate and once I got a couple cyclic redundacy errors I adjusted my process to copy the source file from my data disc to a folder on my HD and burn from there.
Now...this seems to work fine with the viewable VIDEO_TS structure, but some of my better movies are .iso/.img files at the source. I am starting to have problems just copying the .iso/.img from my back-up disc to a new folder on the HD. I get cyclic redundacy errors. I've gotten around this by using a viewable VIDEO_TS structured burn of the .iso/.img as my back-up instead of the original source file.
Now my question:
What should my back-up file be to allow maximum re-burnability? I have also tried saving the VIDEO_TS structure as a data disc for back-up purposes but that only has a 50% success rate of re-burning accuracy. Right now I'm leaning towards simply burning a viewable DVD as a back-up and copying it as needed. Any suggestions?
Could very well be bad media. You should try the 'verify data' option when burning to see if maybe your problem started there.
The hardcore seem to have a disdain for Nero's DVD burning abilities. A free solution to bypass Nero is to take the ISO/IMG's and mount them on a virtual drive and use 'open disc', or with VIDEO_TS movies 'open files' and see if DVDShrink will open them with no problems. You could then have DVDShrink (choose 'no compression' if they fit a blank) convert them to ISO's which you can now burn with ImgBurn/DVDDecypter.
It would seem that burning an actual DVD on good media might make sense, you could burn your ISO/IMG's with ImgBurn/DVDecrypter, again with the 'verify' option. You could later copy these discs with DVDDecrypter's ISO-> Read, ISO-> Write.
Ok MysticE, thanks for the reply. I typed alot to only say a little really. I don't have any problems if I use a viewable DVD as my back-up, only when I use one of these other data options. I'm not particularly interested in developing a 5-6 step process to back-up each movie, I just need to get them off the HD for he sake of space. Is there any reason I shouldn't just use viewable DVDs as my "archive" of sorts?
