good packet writing?

When I first started writing CD-R, which was more recently than for many people, CD-R writing software such as Nero came with separate applications to do packet writing on CD-R -- a separate installation as well as a separate program.

The prevailing wisdom of the times was to avoid all packet writing program like the plague. Simply having such a program installed supposedly caused serious problems with something, I don't remember just what (perhaps writing regular audio CDs?). This claim seems some what questionable -- why would the applications be packaged with serious software if their use was certain disaster? -- but I never tested it, or felt the need for the it, and never thought or read about it since.

In Windows 7 there is the "Live File System" which sounds a lot like packet writing under a different label. It might be convenient to be able to keep a writeable disk in the DVD writer for small, quick back-up jobs. Does anyone know if using this facility is safe vis a vis the rest of the system?

As price of HDs, SSD drives, Flash mem thumb drives has declined use of  packet writing to optical drives, which remains slow and on $/meg basis relatively costly has declined

info on issues should be relatively available all over the net

I do have at least three pages, 2000 words, of notes dating back to 1998 (seemingly last updated in 2004)

I have no experience with Win7 but beginning with Vista MS included a 'crippled' (as is there usual policy) packet writing app it will of necessity be subject to all the issues to which 'packet writing' to optical discs is susceptible

the issues are hardware, software, firmware and there is no guarantee that you & your system will experience them . . . but they can crop up with little warning and almost no ability to recover lost data . .. so the initial caveat is always back up anything packet written to an optical device to something with more robust data storage

Prior to organizing my notes so they make sense to anyone else  giving me some idea as to why you might be interested would be appreciated

In the whole time it's been possible, I have never found a situation in which packet writing on a CD or DVD was the best option available...

Paul

Although my company has never advertised the service, we have often been asked to recover data from CD's - usually after an attempt to physically repair them has failed.  In fact, it became a nice little sideline.

At a rough guess around 70%, maybe more, of those were packet written, which I think says it all.  I know my personal experience with packet writing (which is not a recent one, I admit) was a total disaster area and I soon dropped the idea.  I would say there are many and better ways of reliably storing data and I would wouldn't go near packet writing with the proverbial barge pole.

in 1997 & 98 it might have seemed like a nice idea . . . I think 500 meg HD (not 10k scsi server drives but consumer drives) had dropped to $500 ranges by '95 but even in last couple of years of century & win95 and 98 the 'idea' of writing via drag and drop to 600 meg $1 optical drive (with those 4 gig opticals promised just around the corner) could seem like a good idea

While, for perhaps obvious reasons, the systems never had robust error correction the big problems stemmed from abysmally poor integration in any of the various related hardware, firmware, software standards.  With no perceived demographic to shift resources away from more robust b/u strategies.   The inherent slowness in pack writing to optical guaranteed they would not function as 'working' drives in any case.

I do not see packet writing to optical drives as a practical solution for anything.  Not least because anything stored thus needs to be already or immediately written to more robust media for b/u anyway.  Saves you nothing.  Insurmountably poor implementation (hardware, firmware, software) posses insurmountable hurdles which pose significant probability of insurmountable headaches.  (Data recovery on any media has always been the most thankless task I've ever performed trying to steer people towards behavior (and gear) that might keep me from being called in for data recovery is almost as thankless).

But . . . I never really know what AndyH is trying to ask.  He might be trying to get opinions about whether he should remove the MS Vista/Win7 packet writing app completely from his system.  To which an honest answer would be slightly more difficult (though might entail some info on packet writing) and be dependent on why he thinks he might need to do that, rather then being due simply to a stray neuron firing @ twilight.  Of course the he could still be a post doc sociologist and this could still be a troll/trawl  but hey

I did not mean to be impolite and ignore everyone's suggestions and questions. After several days of no response to my question I decided to just take a chance and try it. I had not been back to this section again until I posted the new thread tonight on a HD problem.

There is a CD drive and a DVD drive in the computer. I put a CD into the CD drive and tried to write on it by dragging a file thereon. The system informed me it had to format the CD first. This took a long time, quite noticeably more than the time to write a full audio CD. Thereafter, writing to the CD seemed to work fine.

The potential profit for me has to do with a variety  of data files I add to often, mostly spreadsheets. They are not very large, but they are important to me. On the Win98 machine I would pop a diskette into drive A and backup when I had added something significant. Here there is no diskette drive.

I tend to doubt that the reliability downside is so extreme, although I don't have any facts. The first audio CDs I made, around the beginning of 2002, still test very good. I know that depends mainly on the quality of the blank. I've used diskettes that had no problems over more than 20 years of use. That also depended on the media quality as I found more than a few bad diskettes, particularly those on which shareware was sold when diskette was king. Anyway, my use for packet writing isn't for long term storage.

I have other backup, in particular a 1TB USB drive. I've also made larger scale optical disk backups. Neither is particularly good for this purpose. I suppose a USB flash drive would be a better option.

The large USB drive is inconvenient for frequent use as there is no room to leave it hanging about. I have to get it out of the cupboard, unpack it, get a power cord, connect, backup, pack, put away. That is ok for general backup but a pain if I might want to write a few small files several times a day.

Each session overhead on regular data CD writing is 20MB, probably a month worth of space for this kind of backup. The software preparation process for adding a session is significantly more time consuming than just dragging, or doing a copy-paste to a ready and waiting packet writing disk. I vote that wasting an entire CD or DVD for one 67KB file backup is absurd.

Anyway, the packet writing seemed to work fine. I don't write regular optical disks most days, so the packet disk could just sit in the drive and be easily added to whenever I wanted. Perhaps a week later, when I wanted to make an audio CD, I exchanged the packet disk for a new blank. My CD writing software gave some strange errors. It could not access (drive? blank CD? I don't recall).

I transferred the CD blank to the DVD drive and wrote the CD. Then I tried the CD drive again and it wrote an audio CD without any problem. Perhaps I needed to dismount the packet disk or some such before trying to use the drive for another purpose, but I haven't tried it again so far (fear of the unknown, I guess).

A 2.5" HD in USB enclosure is fairly small in size, powered off the USB port and can easily be left in situ.

I had always intended to try the packet writing disk again and stuck it back in immediately after my last post on the topic. It hasn't been that long, but so far everything seems fine. If I right click and "eject" the disk before taking it out of the drive, the drive works normally for other tasks. The packet disk is useable as soon as I put it back in. If this continues to work, it seems like a convenient solution.

In the whole time it's been possible, I have never found a situation in which packet writing on a CD or DVD was the best option available...

This remains true.  I can buy a 4GB stick at the supermarket for about the same money that I spend on my weekend newspapers.  It's much faster, and hugely more reliable, than any CD or DVD writing.  It's a no-brainer, really.

Paul

I'm afraid I don't buy the reliability viewpoint, and I don't even know why it is being posed. I already acknowledge that the lifetime of poor quality blanks can be pretty short, although probably not short enough to matter for my purposes. Data on good quality disks is quite likely to be stable for more than ten years.

I ran across some company PR from TY (now JVC media) that claimed, with both  read tests and high power photo micrographs as evidence, that they had 20 year old CD-Rs that showed essentially no deterioration (with data written 20 years ago). And, a high quality DVD R blank costs considerably less than any USB flash drive.

I'm afraid I don't buy the reliability viewpoint, and I don't even know why it is being posed. I already acknowledge that the lifetime of poor quality blanks can be pretty short, although probably not short enough to matter for my purposes. Data on good quality disks is quite likely to be stable for more than ten years.

I ran across some company PR from TY (now JVC media) that claimed, with both  read tests and high power photo micrographs as evidence, that they had 20 year old CD-Rs that showed essentially no deterioration (with data written 20 years ago). And, a high quality DVD R blank costs considerably less than any USB flash drive.

If I understand it correctly, what others are saying is that packet writing may work fine as long as you still have the machine and software combination it was written with. My experience of packet writing from many years ago, admittedly, was that there seemed to be several incompatible standards.

I would nowadays use a usb memory device or an old HD in an external enclosure, where I know exactly what standards are being used to write the data.

I'm afraid I don't buy the reliability viewpoint, and I don't even know why it is being posed. I already acknowledge that the lifetime of poor quality blanks can be pretty short, although probably not short enough to matter for my purposes. Data on good quality disks is quite likely to be stable for more than ten years.

CDR is a dye-based process, and susceptible to sunlight, so it's easier to have accidents with them which can easily erase all your data. That increases the potential unreliability, certainly. CD-RWs are probably a rather better bet to use - they don't have the same destruction mechanism built into them at all. But no manufacturer will claim that you can expect any more than 1000 write/erase cycles with them. Flash drives don't suffer from the dye evaporation problem at all, and many manufacturers claim three orders of magnitude  more erase/write cycles for these devices.

Like Paul, I have no use for packet writing either, but if I did, I think I'd rather run it from an easily-removable, relatively safe device, and not base it on any sort of CD mechanism. A sensibly organised backup policy makes far more sense as far as I'm concerned, and that probably applies to Paul as well.

If you add to a packet-written CD, experience shows that a single error can make all previously written data vanish, or at least become very hard to recover.  You'd be better off writing an iso and adding sessions to it.

Paul

I've already discussed that I want it for a limited purpose. Yes a flash drive would serve as well but I already have the CD and DVD blanks on hand and it turns out that use is easy and convenient. By the time a CD is full, I probably will never again care about what is or isn't on it. By then a "regular" backup will have put the everything important onto the TB USB drive.

While light and heat shorten the life of dye based media, only very careless people leave their disk laying around in direct sunlight. Mine, like those of most people, will not spend much time in much light. Under that condition they will surely last for many years, probably longer than most hard drives I've owned.

I started out with a RW disk but I just changed to a regular CD-R earlier today. It is much faster and I still don't expect it to have any reliability problem stemming from the media or the drive. The OS I'm less sure of, so it is still all experimental.

MS isn't to be trusted of course, but the built in packet writing (live file system) probably stands a reasonable chance of not being made incompatible by future changes very soon.

I 'v used multi session CD-R for about eight years and am now doing the same with DVD for my audio projects (e.g. backing up finished LP transfers). Almost always it works just as expected but there have been a few times when a new session did  something to prevent access to previous sessions. I guess that could also be a possibility with the packet written disks. Obviously it is something for me to keep an eye on. So far there has been no problem and packet writing is faster and more convenient. I can write a copy of a changed file to the packet disk much faster than I could even load the CD-R writing application, let alone set up what to write.

Andy, I fail to understand your view here?

You ask what we think about packet writing systems and as far as I can see, we have all said they're not that clever and there are much better and more convenient ways of storing data - yet still you persist in trying to justify your use of packet writing.

That's your decision, but why ask if you are going to ignore the advice?