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Setup DVD/CD-ROM drive as alternative drive

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gojo

Vendor
Apr 18, 2003
3
US
Attempting to "Backup" files to CD. Requires DVD/CD-ROM drive be setup as alternative drive.

I am on a stand alone desktop with Windows XP, containing a HL-DT-ST CD-RW CGE-8400B (Microsoft supplied) DVD/CD-ROM drive.

Thanks
 
You do not have to do anything special. If the drive is seen in "My Computer" then you should be done.
 
bcastner .... thanks for the reply. I am attempting to backup my Quicken files. When click on "Backup" a message tells me that it cannot write to the CD. The CD is formatted, and is writeable. There is nothing else on the CD, it is totally new. I CAN copy items to it, but it won't "backup" for me.

???
 
I believe that in order for that type of thing to work at all you would need DirectCD or some sort of software like it installed to write directly to the CD.

I'm sure that you could probably use Nero or whatever your favorite burning software is to just make a data cd with the contents you're trying to backup.

Backing up things that change a lot throughout the course of a week or a month though in this manner kind of becomes a pain. I've recently been trying to deal with this myself. What I've been doing is using WinBackup. Most of my data is kept on a complete seperate drive from my system and everything...it's a storage drive. But things like the My Documents folder which contains lots of personal stuff: pictures, video, documents etc..which changes quite a bit over time...this became a pain. WinBackup creates one large backup file which contains all the files you want to keep backed up. You specify folders to include. You can set a time of each day when you want it to add in anything that's changed. It creates a copy of the original backup to make sure there's always a working version...then it creates a new one which contains all updates from the last 24 hours...or however long you specify.

This can eat up some space if you have lots to backup. I have a 240 GB array that I keep all my storage and backup on so I dont have much of a problem.

Well that's my two cents...let me know if it helped any.

drew
 
just to add on...for your particular case you could set the Quicken backup to save to a location on the hard drive, then burn a data CD which contains that file. If you have the space...create a partitin on your drive to hold all of that kind of stuff...then even if you had a system crash you could just format get it back up and have all your data still there.
 
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