Forcing Nero6 to burn DVDs at slower speed?

[BlueWeasel]

A friend of mine owns a small engineering company and I assist him with computer related problems. He has a old P3 1Ghz system that he uses as a simple file-server running W2K Pro.

I recently installed a DVD burner in this system for the purpose of making full nightly backups to run at a specific time. The drive came with Nero6, and the included backup utility, Nero BackItUp, runs great for the simple backup that he needs.

Currently, the backup includes the main data on the file-server as well as minor data from each workstation in his office (ie, documents, photos, etc.) across the 100mbps network.

I'm getting inconsistent buffer errors and incomplete backups to the DVD burner. I'm sure the problem is the burn is failing because the data over the network can't be supplied fast enough for the 8X burn to DVD. It's got a large buffer and the "Burn-Proof' technology, but I still think the data just isn't being delivered fast enough.

For some reason, Nero BackItUp is always attempting to burn at the full speed of the DVD media (8X). Is it possible to set it so it burns at the slowest speed possible -- 2.4X? The backups are scheduled to run each night, so we don't care if it takes 2 hours to backup.

Unfortunately, I don't see an option in the backup program to set the burning speed. Other than getting older 2.4X media, is possible to force the program to burn at the slowest speed regardless of the media?

 

[BlueWeasel]

Bump...although I don't really expect an answer.

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Actually If Im reading this right you are trying to burn this data from directly over the network???? I had always been taught (and found out myself) that 90 percent of the time this is just a big no no. In fact anytime someone I know has done this they receive the errors that youre getting. a better solution would be this:

set up a backup job from all workstations to a common area on the server like d:\backups. within that directory you can have a folder representing each workstation.
on the workstations, use either a scheduled robocopy, or even better syncback to back up a particular set of folders from each workstation (my documents etc) . this gives you a common template to use where all you have to do is change the destination to the folder that corresponds with the workstation name. After you do this you should set up nero to simply burn that backups directory on the server. to me this is really the most reliable way to burn all that data without having issues between network and drive. This is also more predictable which should be most important for his company.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: DarkTXKnight
Actually If Im reading this right you are trying to burn this data from directly over the network???? I had always been taught (and found out myself) that 90 percent of the time this is just a big no no. In fact anytime someone I know has done this they receive the errors that youre getting. a better solution would be this:

set up a backup job from all workstations to a common area on the server like d:\backups. within that directory you can have a folder representing each workstation.
on the workstations, use either a scheduled robocopy, or even better syncback to back up a particular set of folders from each workstation (my documents etc) . this gives you a common template to use where all you have to do is change the destination to the folder that corresponds with the workstation name. After you do this you should set up nero to simply burn that backups directory on the server. to me this is really the most reliable way to burn all that data without having issues between network and drive. This is also more predictable which should be most important for his company.

Yeah, I just assumed that the buffer on the DVD burner would be able to handle the transfer across the network and the DVD would burn OK. If I could find out some way to get it to burn as slow as possible (1X or 2.4X), I think it would work.

Either way, your suggestion is a excellent idea. SyncBack is an excellent program and the ability to setup Group profiles makes it easy to backup multiple directories across his network.

 

[Lonyo]

I found that Nero (IIRC) copied all the stuff across the network to a local drive on the computer that had the DVD burner, THEN started burning. Basically it cached everything to the HDD before burn to take away the risk of any errors.

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Have you tried setting up a backup job using nero cmd instead of using back it up??? I elieve that there are switches to tell the burner what speeds to burn maximum at if you do it that way. I know that if you were just creating burning job in the regular gui you can tell it what speed to go for, so I bet doing it via command line would work.