Vista - Best backup options

I'm in the process of transferring my Hi8 video tapes to my PC for safe
keeping. The one drawback I see with the Hi8 tapes is that if the camcorder
dies, so does my playback mechanism. To get the highest quality I'm
creating AVI files, and each tape is approximately 13 GB of data. I'm
capturing in segments around 3.3 GB each. Needless to say, I've filled most
my PC drive space, including my 300 GB external USB drive.

I'd like to back these files up to DVD as 'raw files' for future editing
(as opposed to actually creating a DVD that can be viewed on a DVD player).
I have Vista Home Premium, and XP Pro as OS options. I started just dragging
the files to the DVD drive on my Vista and had some success, but for some
reason it doesn't always work. Does anyone have any suggestions or
recommendations on how best to back these files up? I've looked at a couple
backup packages but haven't seen anything that strikes me as what I'm
looking for..

Thanks folks!

Mark

What do you observe when "it doesn't always work"? I am looking at doing
something similar, so would like to know why simple moving of files to a DVD
does not work.

"Mark" <mwl@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uzzIFgQYIHA.4828@xxxxxx

Initially when I placed the blank DVD+R in in the drive 'autorun' would pop
up asking what I wanted to do. I'd select "make a data disk using windows"
and a pop-up would say it was preparing the disk, then Windows Explorer
would open with the message to drag files to the disk. Once I dragged one
of the 3.3 GB AVI files to the DVD it would begin copying. This was much
like a standard drag-n-drop file copy from one drive to another. When the
copy completed I'd eject the DVD and be able to read it on my other PC.

However other times all would appear to be good, but the DVD would show no
files when done. Then other times it would seem to work more like a regular
CD burn, where it would build the disk filelist and then prompt that there
were files waiting to be burned - but when I clicked 'write files to disk'
it would hang.

All this is with Vista. I haven't tried it with XP.


"John Hanley" <jphanley@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23tyCLkRYIHA.4208@xxxxxx

I did a test burn using your procedure, and it worked ok. Not exactly, the
largest .avi file I had was only about 0.5 GB, but it burned ok and the
video played from the DVD when I re-inserted the DVD into the (same) DVDRW
player on my computer. Don't know any more than that; hope you get more
help elsewhere.

"Mark" <mwl@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23S5aCDSYIHA.3652@xxxxxx

Well, I tried a smaller file as well and it worked OK, but continue to have
problems with the larger 3.3 GB files. However I have been successful using
Roxio Creator that came on my Vista laptop to get the files backed up. It
still takes an occasional error when creating the disk, but I think that's a
media issue so I'll get some new blank DVDs and see if that clears up the
problem.


"John Hanley" <jphanley@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:utjIdaVYIHA.3652@xxxxxx