Burning files/folders to Blu-Ray

BTRain · 13 Mar 2014

I work for a small city government and we do backups of our files on a daily basis. Whenever we get a few weeks worth, we burn the files to disk for storage. Each week's worth of data is stored in a parent folder, based on the date. Each day has two files, for two separate programs. Each daily file is zipped. The parent folder is not. Using a 25GB disk, with about 23.5GB free space, I can usually get two weeks worth of data on each disk. That's just over 17GB total. If I add another week, it puts it over the total free space. Sometimes, though, if we have a short week, the weekly folder will be smaller. So sometimes it's possible to fit three weeks on a disk. There lies the problem. It seems that for some reason, if I burn three parent folders at the same time, it always creates a burn error and it doesn't work. If I remove one of the folders and go back to two weeks, it works fine.

I first thought it was the Blu-Ray burner that I was using. It was an external Samsung burner. I was able to purchase an internal LG burner. It does the same thing. When I burn them, I don't use a program. I open Windows Explorer, highlight the files I want, and send them to the disk drive. When they copy over, I click burn disk.

Is this a Windows issue? I've updated firmware and any other updates I can think of. If anybody could give me some advice, that'd be great.

Thanks

MilesAhead · 13 Mar 2014

The space used by any file on a disk, be it HD, or optical disc, is often larger than the file size. The file system uses clusters. A cluster is a group of sectors. So say as example you have 512 byte sectors and 4 sectors to a cluster, the average "wasted" space on disk per file is theoretically 1/2 a cluster. In this case that would 1 KB. With larger cluster sizes you waste more space. A cluster is the smallest unit that a file system can allocate to a file.

Depending on the file system used on the optical disc you need to have more free space available than just the total of all the file sizes. I would try burning with a program that would figure that stuff out and tell if you the image will fit on the disc.

Imgburn is very reliable and I believe it supports BluRay.

BTRain · 14 Mar 2014

Thanks MilesAhead. I didn't use Imgburn, but did download a free burning software and it worked. I don't understand it though. I used the same three folders as before, and it worked. I guess it's the way that Windows Explorer handles it.

Thanks again.

MilesAhead · 14 Mar 2014

I used the same three folders as before

Hmm, I wonder if the files were burned in the same order? Maybe the 3rd party burner had enough intelligence to burn those that would produce the least wasted space first? I dunno'. :)