whitehound

I was wondering that. But even though our electronic media are a bit unstable we have so *much* printed material as well that I think there's a good chance of enough being carried forwards - even in degraded Chinese whispers versions - for future historians to be able to work it out. We are able to read texts from nearly 5,000 years ago by working back in stages from modern languages, and the only reason we can't go back any further is because there was no writing before that. Even if our descendants dispense with printed paper for every day use and just use electronic text, there'll probably still be plenty of things like gravestones and public monuments made of durable materials and creating a continuous sequence which will enable people to work back. And there are some peoples who value written text for its own sake. Assuming Judaism survives that long - which it probably will - there will still be people hand-writing Hebrew texts with good durability and very little linguistic drift, because hand-writing the Torah and understanding whay it means is part of Jewish ritual. So ancient Hebrew will still be understood at least to some extent, and any surviving printed Jewish prayerbooks which give the Hebrew version and a translation into another language will serve as a Rosetta Stone.

Maybe the guy was joking about calling me a spy - but why should I assume so? I've seen too many websites full of genuine paranoics who assume that anybody who doesn't agree with them about anything must be some sort of spy, and been accused of being a sock-puppet for somebody I'd never heard of just because we both wrote educated English. I'm not impatient to have him make ImgBurn multisession - it would be nice if it did, but if it doesn't it doesn't and I'll use something else. I imagine making it work as a multisession burner involves a lot of work and virtually writing a whole new app, rather than just fiddling with the existing one. But at he same time there's no point in me using ImgBurn if the only thing I actually want it for is something it doesn't do (unless you can feed video signals into it - at some point I want to transfer video-tapes onto dvd but I imagine that for that you need the sort of dvd recorder that fits under the telly, not a pc one). But why was somebody talking about deleting an individual file from a DVD (rather than erasing the whole thing) and getting or not getting their space back, and being told how to go about it, if it doesn't do multisession? Anyway, I invested in a new DVD burner (a Pioneer - very cheap but gets top reviews) and that seems to be doing the business, even with Nero. I can hardly believe it formatted a dvd correctly at the first attempt! - I'm so used to just making coasters. I know that dvds formatted this way are prone to suddenly stopping working, probably because when you delete files you don't get your space back, so they can fill up suddenly. But I'm going to make two dvd copies of everything, one on -rw and one on +rw. It's unlikely both copies would fail at the same time, so if anything nasty happens to my hard drive I'll still have my files. I may sound paranoid, but I've had two hard drive failures and a motherboard that blew its capacitors, and a mad static-fiilled printer, and in each case I only got my files out by the skin of their or my teeth, plus a friend recently had his modem fried when the telephone wires near his house were struck by lightning. Putting everything on dvd means that even if somebody let off a small nuke in the atmosphere and fried all the electronics, I'd still have my files - although probably not a dvd player to play them on. None of these things last forever, of course - the only really long-term media are hard stones such as granite, solid gold, ceramics (so long as they are protected from breakages) and heavy-duty acid-free paper. A text inscribed on gold will probably still be around in 30,000 years!

Oh for God's sake - why the **** should I be a spy just because I want to back my stories and graphics files up instead of ripping off films? I've owned a dvd drive for three years and the first time I actually played anything on it was a home-made recording of a friend singing, a few weeks ago. That was what started this, because I discovered that the Emprex burner was stuck on playing US-format DVDs even though it was bought in the UK and had never played a film. This led to a long discussion on a forum called videohelp where there were a lot of bullying, sneering types saying "If you haven't got ImgBurn you're a moron and we won't even discuss this", even though I pointed out that I wasn't trying to burn DVDs and did not at that point wish to do so. When I did need to burn DVDs I decided to give it a whirl - but I should have known from the way it was being over-promited that it wouldn't do what I wanted I have no interest in copying films and, therefore, no interest in what ImgBurn does, OK? I had hoped it would enable me to do the "format disc as floppy" thing that Nero does, only better - but it doesn't do it at all, so I'm stuck with Nero and their useless support team. Why is that so hard to comprehend? Are you so obsessed with films that you can't imagine anyone not being interested in them? I watch about three films a year, on the telly, as background whilst doing something else. I'm not a spy - who the **** would I be spying for? - and I'm sure that ImgBurn does whatever it does do very well, but as far as word of mouth goes I've already seen enough to warn other people *not* to go for ImgBurn if they can avoid it, because in order to get any support you have to go on a forum and deal with people who are not only as (from my point of view) useless as Nero's I'll-get-back-to-you-some-time-in-the-next-six-years support team, but actively rude, unpleasant and paranoid.

Can files on a USB Stick be fried by an elecrical surge? I would have thought so - the files aren't actually burned into the medium in the way they are on a cd or dvd, are they? I tried flashing the Emprex but it's still just as bad, so I've given up on it and ordered a Pioneer. And in answer to the person who thinks I am a) a bloke and a spy for Nero, I am a 50-year-old woman, formerly a FoxPro progammer with the NHS, and I detest Nero with a deep and abiding loathing - but it does what I want it to do. Or it would, if the Emprex drive worked, and didn't destroy 8 out of every 9 discs put into it.

Because I want to have an optical copy of my files updated as I work, of course. I have ten years' worth of literary and graphic work on this PC, and as I already said, I want a copy that can't be fried by an electrical surge. I've already had a nasty experience with a faulty printer that built up a static charge which bypassed the surge protector. What does it matter, anyway? I know what I want and why I want it, and ImgBurn obviously isn't it. I've just flashed the DVD drive's firmware, so maybe it will work better with Nero now. If not I need a new DVD burner - it's always been a bit of a lemon.

Again, it's something that could easily be wiped by an electrical or magnetic surge, and in any case I'm talking about backing up 42 gigs of files. I couldn't afford that many pen drives. I own one 16Gb pen drive which I've only just bought, and I'm not even sure it will work with Win98. I already back everything up onto a second hard drive but I want something more secure, especially as I am about to re-work and upgrade my system in a way that means that I will have to wipe and reformat one of the hard drives, and will therefore temporarily have only one copy of my files. I need to burn all the files to DVD before I reformat the backup hard drive, so that if anything goes wrong with the main drive while I'm swapping my system around, I won't lose my files. Ho hum - it seems I'm stuck with Nero. Crap though it is, it does what I want - when it works.

Does this mean that ImgBurn cannot be used to format a DVD to use like an enormous floppy, so that one can add files to the disc, overwrite or delete files etc? If it can't do that then that's a pity, because doing so is the only reasdon I wanted ImgBurn and, indeed, the only use I have for a DVD burner I've no interest in films etc.: I just want a way of backing up my files that can't be destroyed by a stray electrical surge, and I can't afford to start a new disc every time I want to update my backups. But I thought I saw in the FAQs a mention of deleting individual files from discs, which sounds as if ImgBurn *can* be used to create flexible backups?

I'm new to ImgBurn, but this sounds to me like the standard Windows bug which always affects copying a batch of files, attaching files to emails, playing a group of music tracks etc. The first one listed ends up last, and often the last one ends up first, although the ones in between are in the right order. I have found by trial and error that the way round this is to do as follows: Say you have 12 files you wish to copy. Select files 2-12 as a block, by left-clicking on no. 2, then holding down Ctrl+Shift and left-clicking no. 12. Now that you have files 2-12 highlighted, hold down Ctrl (only) and left-click file no. 1, to add it to the highlighted block. Any action you perform on the highlighted files should now go in the right order, with no. 1 first. It works for playing music, it works for attaching files to emails, and I bet it'll work for burning files as well.