Software to Most Efficiently Fit Files onto DVDs?

[Yasashii]

I use DVDs to back up my files. I know it's archaic and slow but it's the cheapest way I know of and if a DVD is corrupted, I only lose 4.37GB of data instead of 1TB, for instance, so yeah. Safety first!

Back to the point. I have a bunch of files I need to burn. The thing is, they vary in size. Some are a few hundred megs, some are, like, 3 gigs. I want to fit as much data on each DVD, so that there's as little wasted storage as possible (and I'd rather not use disc spanning and such).

The way I normally go about it is that I manually try to figure out the best combination of files to fill the 4.37GB. That takes quite a bit of time. It's occurred to me that I'm probably not the first guy to have this problem and so there's probably software for this kind of stuff. Google searches have yielded no results, though. All I get is some curve fitting software, which I don't even know what that is (here's a suggestion for the next Tech Quickie video, Linus )

So my question is: does anyone here know of software that would scan a directory I specify for folders and files and automatically figure out and show me which files I should put together to most efficiently fill a specified amount of storage, such as the storage available on a DVD?

[Griefa]

You must spend bare money on DVD's! May I suggest one of these:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elements-Portable-External-Hard-Drive/dp/B00CRZ2PRM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1490221935&sr=8-2&keywords=1tb+hdd+external

 

And this:

http://synchronicity.sourceforge.net/

 

Just set and forget!

 

Otherwise, if you like the idea of removable media, get yourself a tape drive, as you'll be able to write everything onto single tapes. You can get them second hand for less than £40 (less Euro monies). 

 

Edit: To answer the original question, nope, sorry. I do know that CD Burner XP does automatically assign data to CD's but it will not do anything like organise data to fill a CD. 

[Yasashii]

2 minutes ago, Griefa said:

You must spend bare money on DVD's!

Actually, no. Today I bought two 25-packs of Maxell DVDs, each costing me 15zł (less than $4).

So I spent 30zł to get 218.5GB. A decent 1TB drive would set me back more than 200zł, so DVD's are still cheaper.

And HDD's don't last forever so one day it would die on me and I'd suffer a data loss of 1TB. I'm unwilling to take that risk.


I'm thinking of buying DVDs in bulk... It will probably be even cheaper.

[Griefa]

3 minutes ago, Yasashii said:

Actually, no. Today I bought two 25-packs of Maxell DVDs, each costing me 15zł (less than $4).

So I spent 30zł to get 218.5GB. A decent 1TB drive would set me back more than 200zł, so DVD's are still cheaper.

And HDD's don't last forever so one day it would die on me and I'd suffer a data loss of 1TB. I'm unwilling to take that risk.


I'm thinking of buying DVDs in bulk... It will probably be even cheaper.

That's fair. 

 

The only reason I mention the alternatives, is because I want to save your precious time and effort, and can't offer a DVD burning alternative 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I think the problem with this is that there may be too many possible combinations to consider. And things would especially get awkward if you tried to keep the directory structure the same i.e., if you have "Foobar\Fizzbuzz\File1.txt" in one DVD and "Foobar\Fizzbuzz\File2.txt" in another DVD, it'd be a pain to figure out which DVD had that file.

 

The only other thing I could think of is you can use a file compression program like 7-zip to archive the entire thing and have it split the archive in to DVD sized chunks. Of course the problem with that is if you lose one DVD, you lose the entire archive.

 

10 minutes ago, Yasashii said:

And HDD's don't last forever so one day it would die on me and I'd suffer a data loss of 1TB. I'm unwilling to take that risk.

This is why, ideally, you should have multiple backups on different kinds of storage media. DVD-Rs, if you get a cheap brand, don't last very long.

[SImoHayha]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

 

 

All Dvd's last a long time if you take the time to cover each one up from the elements like any other console, car or precious item. As long as they don't get scratched, burned, toasted or placed into an alcohol solution a majority of the time DVD's will last forever. 

I still have the classic FF8 CD's and they are still kicking in my PS2 today, again caring for your CD's and DVD's will make them last nearly forever. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Ramamataz said:

All Dvd's last a long time if you take the time to cover each one up from the elements like any other console, car or precious item. As long as they don't get scratched, burned, toasted or placed into an alcohol solution a majority of the time DVD's will last forever. 

I still have the classic FF8 CD's and they are still kicking in my PS2 today, again caring for your CD's and DVD's will make them last nearly forever. 

We're talking about DVD-Rs. DVD-R's use some kind of dyeing agent to mask the reflective layer. Depending on the quality of build, this will rot fairly shortly in the context of using writable optical media as a backup/archival media.

 

Pressed media is a different story.

[Yasashii]

Yup. I still have some CD's from the early 2000's and they read fine. They are Verbatims, though. And I think they're probably some fancy ones since they are blue on the back, rather than the usual yellowish. (Edit: yup, they are Metal AZO's)

As for DVD rot, before that happens the data will probably be of little to no importance to me, and/or I will have made another copy of it.

Also, I'd like to point out that after a closed-session DVD has been burnt, it becomes read-only storage. If I used an HDD, for example, every time I go to somebody's house to copy something off it onto their computer, I'd have to pray that their PC isn't infected with a virus that automatically copies itself onto new media via autorun. With DVD's I don't have to worry about it.