It’s time to clean house on my two hardrives. Their clogged with all manner of files from downloaded tv shows to mp3’s, etc.
I have a recordable DVD drive so I’m going to tranfer all the bloat over to some DVD’s. So far so good, except that when I’m about to burn my first DVD using NERO burning rom, I notice that the file names have been shortened.
I go into properties and I see that ISO (the standard format when burning a “data disc”) allows a max of 31 characters
I did check out the UDF format and that actually takes in more characters than that, so my question is: can I burn it in UDF format? Can I burn my regular (non DVD) cd’s using UDF format? What are the differences between iso and udf and will it mean I’ll be limited in the future as to how I can access my data?
I like long, descriptive file names, therefore it is crucial that I eb able to keep the file name lengthy, is there any way to allow ISO discs to handle long file names? (32+ characters?) using Nero?
Yes. “CD-ROM (UDF)” is listed near the end of the disc type choices. However, I have to ask why would you back up with 700MB CDs when you have 4.3GB DVD discs?
Well, UDF is supposed to be the successor to ISO. I believe that the main reason for the “upgrade” to UDF is that it supports files larger than 2GB, which is why UDF is the format of DVD-Video. As far as “future” access… If you mean “the future” to be the next 5-10 years, then yes you’ll absolutely be able to access it. If you mean “50-100 years”, then I’m positive that something will replace UDF by then. But there will be a period of “mutual acceptance” where you’ll be able to convert things to a newer format. After all, ISO is pretty dated, but there’s no indication that ISO is going away any time soon, either. IN any case, as long as your system can play DVD-Video discs, you can read UDF.
You can burn the disc in UDF. Or you can use a program like WinZip or WinRAR to put everything into a file called ARCHIVE.ZIP or ARCHIVE.RAR that’s CD\DVD friendly but retains long life names when uncompressed. That’s why I used to do when backing up my MP3s.
If you go this route, keep in mind that things like video and music are probably already compressed, so putting them into ZIP or RAR files won’t save any space and will take forever unless you use the “fast” compression algorithm.
I prefer using WinRAR, as this give you the option of creating recovery records, which can repair the archive if it should become corrupt for any reason.
