Burning a disk Spanning disks

[cuvec]

Hello,

I have read through the forums. I have a couple BD recorders, built into a laptop and a few LG drives in desktops. I read that LG was not a good drive for dual layer, which If would have know this before I would have bought something else.. But anyway, I have never burned a BD disk. So I have a program that is 55gb in size. I found Smartbuy 10-disc 50gb 6x Blu-ray Bd-r Dl Dual Layer Double Layer White Inkjet Hub Printable for about 1.89 a disk in a 10 pack on amazon. I would need to span across 2 disks. I also found 50 Verbatim Blu Ray 25 Gb Bd-r Single Layer 6x Speed Original Spindle Printable Blueray at 1.39 per disk and have to span 3 disks. Both will cost me 4 dollars to burn this project.

My question is can I just drag the 55gb folder into the IMG burn software and it will span the disks? Or if I create an image file, will it span the disk? Back in the old days of floppy disks, if the file was to big for the disk it would span disks. I hope this is the case for blu ray..  If not, then I probably will never use the burner aspect of my drives which is a shame and buy a large external HD and store files there.

[dbminter]

ImgBurn does not support burns that span across more than 1 disc.  You could create two ISO's in Build mode, one with about 50 GB of the contents to a BD-R DL and the rest of the contents to a 25 GB BD-R.  Or just use 3 BD-R's and create 3 ISO's.  However, if this is some kind of software disc, you'd have to copy the contents from all "spanned" discs to a folder on some kind of media like an HDD, SSD, or flash drive in order to execute.  And even then, that might not work for running it as the software could check that it's not on its original disc somehow.

 

Another solution, though it's even more expensive, is if your BD burner supports TL discs, you could get a BD-R TL and burn the entire 55 GB disc image to one of those.  However, that's not very cost effective, but it is an option.

 

As for LG's and DL BD, if you got the NS60, you're probably fine.  If you have the NS40, yes that did not write properly to BD DL discs in all the time I used the NS40 before trying and switching to the NS60.

[ThaCrip]

dbminter pretty much summed it up.

but I just thought I would add that when it comes to spanning discs in a general sense (for other random people who might read this post)... there is a small amount of large MKV files I want to backup but won't fit on a standard 4.7GB DVD. so what I did was basically take 7-zip, and using no compression (so it goes as fast as possible as video files don't compress well anyways so it's not worth waiting for it to compress so I use no compression which greatly speeds up time to finish creating the files), I split it to '4481m' which will just barely fit on a standard 4.7GB DVD and then I simply burn those files to say 2-3 DVD's (or whatever yours takes) with ImgBurn.

but to use the actual MKV file if I need to restore from these discs... I would have to copy the files from each DVD (.7z.001 to .7z.002 and so on) back to a folder on the hard drive and then extract it from those 7-zip files by opening the first file and than extract the file(s) from it and then I would now have the original MKV file back to perfect working order just like the original one. so this is not really for practical usage, but is good for long term storage of a file you don't want to lose that won't fit on standard 4.7GB media and your not planning on using in general.

on windows that will be easy since it's got a nice GUI for selecting these options. but if your on Linux keep reading since it's not as easy mostly in the sense of getting it not to use compression as if your using compression it's easy enough to do through the GUI that Linux Mint gives us by selecting files, right click, then select 'Create Archive...' and the GUI is easy enough after this point. but if your trying not to use any compression there is no option for that in the GUI which is a shame etc.

but on Linux I had to use the command line (I used the following on Mint v20.3-Xfce... https://www.7-zip.org/a/7z2107-linux-x64.tar.xz ; or for newest for Linux 64bit go to... https://www.7-zip.org/download.html and find "64-bit Linux x86-64" version and download it) for which I did something like...

./7zz -mx0 -v4481m a NameOfFileToCreate.7z FilesToAdd*

that "FilesToAdd*" can be modified a bit if you want to as in the example I used above it will basically add any files that start with 'FilesToAdd' and the "*" will basically just assume it will include all files that start with 'FilesToAdd but ignore everything else in the directory. for example, say I had the following files in the directory...

File1234.txt

File123456.mkv

File2345.mkv

by using "File1*" (swapped with the "FilesToAdd*" in my example above) it would add both the File1234.txt file and the File123456.mkv file but ignore the File2345.mkv as that would not be added to the archive (but if you did "File*" it would add all three files). but to make things easier if your only adding one file you could simply just type the precise name of the file and that would work. but if it's the only file of it's type in that directory it would probably be faster/easier to just type "*.mkv" for example if it was the only MKV file you wanted to add to the archive in the directory.

that "-mx0" switch just tells 7-zip not to use any compression. the "-v4481m" is the volume file size in MB (it's actually a bit under 4,700,000,000 bytes for each file which just barely fits on a standard 4.7GB DVD) you want before it splits (I know 4481m is the MAX you can go for it to fit on all DVD's (technically you could go a little larger for DVD-R but it's best to leave it as 4481 so it will fit on both DVD+R and DVD-R as it's not worth losing the ability to burn to DVD+R if needed by making it a little too large to fit on DVD+R but would fit on DVD-R) and the "a" is for add files and the rest should be fairly straight forward given my example.

p.s. I changed to the 7z2107 folder first in terminal and put the files I wanted to add in that same directory to make things a bit easier. but I suspect I could probably just swap out the "FilesToAdd*" with the precise location of the file(s) I want to add like say "/home/user/Downloads/File.mkv" ('user' will be swapped with whatever yours is setup as). NOTE: Linux is case sensitive so if your file has a capital letter and you type a lower case I think it will error out when selecting the name of the file and the same goes for directory naming I think.

[dbminter]

In that 7zip example, you may be able to load the necessary first file (Which may be the last one, sometimes.) from the disc and then just swap in discs, directing 7zip when it reaches end of input.  I've never actually tested this, but 7zip may detect end of input and ask for the location of the next file in the chain.  Of course, it may not, as well, simply abending at end of input when all files are not present in the same location at the same time.  Macrium Reflect does ask for the next file in order if it isn't found, so you can swap out discs in order without the need to copy all files to one location first.  (Well, a recent bug that was fixed meant you actually COULDN'T do that until I discovered it.    )

[ThaCrip]

Well at least trying to load the first ".7z.001" file (even the ".7z.002") directly from the DVD drive disc it errors with a 'An error occurred when loading the archive.' through GUI.

even trying a basic extraction from terminal errors... 'Can not open the file as archive' etc. the same result on both files (i.e. ".7z.001" and ".7z.002")

so as far as I can tell both files must be located on hard drive first before I can open the first file at which point it will function as expected and then I can extract the file(s).

but yeah, it would have been nice to be able to just leave it on the disc and extract the files out of it as this would save time since I would not have to copy files back to hard drive first, then load the file and then extract.

[dbminter]

Did you try loading the last file first?  Sometimes, a split archive contains some kind of indexing material in the final file, requiring it be loaded first.  That's how Reflect does it.  If you try to load the first file, it will ask for the last file in the chain first and then ask for the first file again after processing the index file in the final file.

 

I have a feeling 7zip isn't "smart" enough to do this.  It hasn't been programmed in a way other than to expect all files in a chain to be in the same location.

 

In the days of floppy disks, PKZIP/WinZip would let you span multiple diskettes and was "smart" enough to ask for the last floppy first.

[ThaCrip]

Well I tried the basic extraction with the ".7z.001" (i.e. the first file) and ".7z.002" (i.e. the last file) and got same result.

but I suspect what you just said summed it up as 7-zip just don't do have that feature in the software as looking around online, I found some posts trying to do what I wanted to do and it appears 7-zip can't do it.

so basically if I need to restore this data in the future ill have to just copy each DVD's 7z file back to a folder on hard drive and then open the first file at which point it will extract the data as expected. but not a huge problem as what I burned is mostly for long term data storage as I don't plan on needing to extract that data in general.