On 31 Jul 2005 at 7:57, Phil Daley wrote: > At 06:25 PM 7/30/2005, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >With WinXP, it started breaking, becoming unreliable (because of the > >addition of the staging area, I believe). > > > >This was my point: using the drive CORRECTLY (as you agree, it seems > >to me), it now, with WinXP, doesn't work reliably. > > I was unaware that you could use XCOPY to write to a CD-R.
Then you didn't read the meassage you quoted in your reply. And, of course you can use XCOPY to write to a CD-R -- it's a writable drive, so, naturally XCOPY works. It doesn't work reliably in WinXP, because the CD-R writing interface has been hijacked and command prompts have been left out in the cold in a state of unreliability because of it. > Since it is so easy to use a CD Creator program and you can save the > "Image file" so it can be used multiple times, I can see no reason to > use an unreliable program, like XCOPY. How do you script a CD Creator program for regular backup, so that it's a single doubleclick for the end user? Secondly, why would you want to repeatedly backup a single image of your data files? Have you given any thought to the problems I'm outlining here or are you just shooting off your mouth? > I gave up using it when log files names arrived. If you're doing a full backup, yes, imaging the drive is great. But if all you're doing is a data backup (substantially less data), then it's not satisfactory. Of course, reading again, I don't see that you are saying to image the drive for backup as a way of solving the long filenames issue (i.e., the CD file system has a limit on the length of filenames/paths that is less than that of NTFS, so you very often run into files that can't be copied to a CD with the same path name as on the drive you're backing up). Second, imaging a drive to a CD-R is not going to work very well. So, it seems *you* haven't given much thought to the issue, which is BACKING UP YOUR DATA. CD-R ought to be an ideal medium for that, but here are the problems with it: 1. the built in backup program provided with WinXP can only use hard drives or floppy disks, not CD-R. 2. the built-in tools for creating CD-Rs are not scriptable, so you can't create a backup script to run at will or no a schedule. 3. the only scriptable mtehod I know of that has worked in Windows for a long time is using XCOPY to back up to CD-R. This has worked for, literally, years, on both NT- and Win9x-based versions of Windows. What would you suggest for backup, both method and medium? So far, you look like an idiot because you're discounting my experience, yet you haven't even read my messages sufficiently thoroughly to have even grasped the basics of what I'm talking about. Stop shooting off your mouth and either admit you're out of your area of expertise or propose a backup solution that works. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
