So we’re running out of space again. Claudia had another show for her students, and I recorded it all on tape. The Saturday show resulted in around 20G of raw material, and with that the “DVD” harddisk is full. No space for the Sunday show. There are a few other projects with raw material that we haven’t converted to DVD images, yet. Strangely enough, DVD images is what we’re using as file format for video material these days.
So here’s a breackdown of what I want to backup:
||Alex Home||1.62G|| ||:--:||:--:|| ||Claudia Home||2.03G|| ||Music||52.3G|| ||Audio||3.11G|| ||Books||18.91G|| ||DVD||189.41G|| ||Old Stuff||1.14G|| ||Pictures||11.54G||
Yeah, it sucks. “Old Stuff” includes old home directories from my GNU/Linux days and the like. Nobody cares.
The difference between “Audio” and “Music” is that Music is on the primary disk (and thus can be used without any ventilators). The Audio stuff includes audiobooks and WW2 news samples. Now that we hardly use iTunes and the SqueezeBox anymore – using the iPod and a dedicated system where the iPod plugs in – I might get away with putting the iTunes Library on to an external disk and merging Audio and Music. That would be interesting.
The “DVD” stuff that really wastes space is raw material. Incredible. 10min of video take about 1G of space. Yuck!
My external harddisks are 250G each. No matter how I try, I cannot reduce one set of backups to a single disk: Those 190G of video material will prevent that. What I can do, however, is to stop splitting backups along the Alex/Claudia line and only split along the DVD/other line.
Damn. I’m not sure this actually saves anything, since all the complicated stuff is taken care of by the Backup command line.
I’d also like to burn some stuff to double layer disks. Whenever I insert them into my Mac Mini who is supposed to know how to handle them, nothing happens. I’m expecting an empty disk on my Desktop that I can fill with some video files, but no luck. I’ve tried five of them, and I keep getting no result. It’s hard to believe that they should *all* be defective. When I check my system properties ¹ I see that it should be possible to burn DVD + R DL disks. And that’s exactly what my DVDs are labelled with. But when I create a “burn folder” and click the burn button, it tells me to insert a disk of size X and presents me with the Cancel button.
Investigating the command line:
Pyrobombus:~ alex$ drutil status
Vendor Product Rev
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-846 FM3J
Type: DVD+R DL Name: /dev/disk4
Cur Write: 2.4x DVD Sessions: 0
Max Write: 2.4x DVD Tracks: 0
Overwritable: 927:30:74 blocks: 4173824 / 8.55GB / 7.96GiB
Space Free: 927:30:74 blocks: 4173824 / 8.55GB / 7.96GiB
Space Used: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Layer 0: blocks: 2086912 / 4.27GB / 3.98GiB
Writability: appendable, blank, overwritable
Hm, that sounds about right!
Testing `drutil burn /Volumes/Extern/DVD/foo/bar` – seems to work! Well, at least the process starts... Waiting...
Cool, apparently that works.
Strange to think that Mac OS 10.4 doesn’t have GUI support to burn double layer DVDs.
#Gadgets #Mac
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Good luck! You can never have enough disk space, that’s for sure. Sounds like it’s time to invest (an immediately fill) a 750Gb external drive.
Remember the good old days when a 20Mb hard drive seemed *huge*?! I do. Darn, I’m gettin’ old 😄
– GreyWulf 2008-05-25 22:39 UTC
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Hah, I’m younger than you are, apparently, for my first PC had a 40M disk!
Then again, I remember using my ZX Spectrum 48k with tapes and playing Elite on it... Those were the days!
)
– Alex Schroeder 2008-05-25 23:39 UTC