Hey what ways (software apps) can be used to burn a DVD-R as a storage media? Right now when I put a DVD-R to enjoy the 4.7 gig goodness of storage I am not able to save to it like a CD-R.
Someone please tell me that there are other ways to store to a DVD-R than just iDVD.
I use Toast Titanium by Roxio. Are you trying to rewrite to it? I thought that finder could burn disks?
Finder is able to burn dvd's, just go about it as you would with a cd
.
Generally with finder a CD-R image pops up, you throw stuff on the icon like you would a hard drive, and then drag the CD-R to the trash to burn the disk.
This is not happening when I put a DVD-R in. Using a G4 Mac with 10.3.9 (And I have burned the typical DVD that would work in a regular DVD player with great success.)
. . . . especially if your machine didn't come with the DVD burning drive, then you need to use a program like "PatchBurn" as a driver. I strongly suggest that you bump your OS up to system 10.4.8. It has built in support for a variety of DVD burners that OS 10.3 doesn't. However, don't use both, instead, OS 10.4.8 supplants PatchBurn, which must be uninstalled (if you previously installed it) under this newest OS X. This is what I did with a 500Mhz PowerBook. Good luck.
Mutant_Pie
There's also the option of using Burn, if you prefer an open-source route (though I've not tried it myself):
http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/
http://www.opensourcemac.org/
I've been burning many DVD's and VDVD's and having a blast doing it. PatchBurn and Burn worked great in my 10.3.9 environment.
I've been amazed lately just how much stuff I can fit on a DVD-R too.
So thanks to all!
just a final comment;
1) You rock for using Bubsy as your icon
and 2) when you get blank DVD's, it's best to get the highest quality possible, otherwise you may not be able to retrieve data from discs you've burned. This is a great guide to determine what kind of quality the discs you're using are:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
I've found, consistently, the Sony 4x-16x DVD-R spindles are always in that "1st Class" bracket. I've yet to come across any that are made by another manufacturer, nor have I burned a single coaster that wasn't my own fault; every disc I've burned for video, Xbox/PS2, or backup have all worked flawlessly.
Snoop around the site, they have a lot of good FAQs and informational stuff.
"just a final comment;
"
1) You rock for using Bubsy as your icon
LOL! You know I saw your icon on a for sale message and was thinking "Sonic, neat!" I'm just amazed that you remembered who Bubsy was. If you are ever on YouTube I have a ton of Bubsy videos, mostly featuring the Jaguar game, but I have shots of Bubsy on many of the other platforms as well.
And now that I have collected all the games, pictures, and magazine articles I can find of Bubsy; along with making new Bubsy fan material I have started wondering if I should check out Sonic for a while.
I know what games I've tried I was never disappointed. It's just that Sonic is very popular, which was exactly not the reason why I liked Bubsy Bobcat. 
(And thanks for the advice on the DVD-R platters... so far, no coasters here, just had Burn putting things in Mac HFS format by default for a while... so those worked great on Macs, but not to my Video-DVDR player.)
Back to the original thread a bit, I hope. I am not aware of any DVD-R media that is sold for archival purposes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have not found a disk pack that says "You will be able to read this in 25 years". Ditto CD-R, although I have never experienced read problems with 12 year old disks burned on Kodak Gold or similar. I don't trust CD-Rs based on newer dye compositions.
Personally, I do not trust any burnable optical media for archiving purposes. I store all of my historical data (eg old Apple disk images) on multiple hard disks, and transfer it to newer disk technology periodically. There is a theoretical risk of corruption when copying files from disk to disk, but I find that preferrable to optical disk rot.
Because I personally hate hard drive media. I have had that mechanical means fail so many times in my life. And then you have leap through hoops and sometimes older hardware to access those old hard drives.
I have found that at least the CD-R's and DVD-R's can be read by any computer and very portable. They are fragile, but aside from that, work great.
So bottom line, we all like all media for different reasons. No one solution is guarenteed to last longer than others though.
There was a recent story about movie studios keeping masters on hard drives to prevent loss. The backup plan included migrating to new drives every 2-3 years. Keeping data on a hard drive is not a bad idea, it's done every day by nearly every modern computer on the planet. Relying on it to be kept there for an extended period of time is another matter. From what I've read, mag tape is still the best and most reliable long term storage method.
Magnetic tape? I think I have a magnetic data reader somewhere.
Nah, I mainly save the important data from computer to computer as I buy new ones, and the stuff I save to CD-Rs and all gets recompiled along with it.
Not magnetic. If you are mega serious about using a single medium for long term storage, use punched tape made from Tyvek. Storage density may be a problem and read speed is challenging, but it will last a long time. Probably more years than you exist on this planet.
I'm not aware of any commercial data archives that use Tyvek, but if you search for start string tyvek "piano roll" end string you may get some interesting results.
I am guessing on these numbers, but...
hard-drive: 2-3 years longevity and getting shorter
SD-RAM: 5 years longevity (there have been a few recent announcements of SD-RAM drives as hard disk replacements.)
CD-ROM: 5-8 years longevity
microfiche: 100 years, for really longterm storage, write to microfiche and put the rolls in canisters and keep the canisters in an abandoned mine shaft. The problem with these types of "longterm" storage media is recovery. Like how would you pull data off of a degraded mag tape when the mag tape device may not even work anymore?
I was watching a Mr. Freeze episode in the current Batman series. Years in the future, roughly 140, some people are trying to find a solution to a Mr. Freeze that had just come out of suspended animation.
They find the Batcave, and they work to get the computer working again, but no luck, the media and computer are just too far gone. But they discover on the walls etched into titanium plating a binary code of 0's and 1's. They scan them over, play them back, and from there a program that Batman left behind was able to activate and help them in taking out Mr. Freeze.
Thought that was interesting. Anyway, thanks for all the quotes of times for storage.
I think above all, I am growing to hate hard drives. 