[X4U] How big is a DVD really?

[David Ledger]

>From: Stroller <macmonster at myrealbox.com>
>
>Answers in metric or imperial dimensions will not be appreciated. ;P

Ok, 339 points ;-)

 From recently archiving the clips from a videocam tape imported with 
iMovie, I would put the size at about 4.3GB. Using a 'Burn Folder' I 
had to remove clips until it was that size before it would burn to a 
normal DVD-R.

David


>I have always understood writable DVD disks to have a capacity of
>4.7gig, and indeed I have some DVD-Rs here that are marked as such.
>Confusingly, I also have some dual-layer DVDs which are marked as
>8.5gig - I thought the whole distinction between single- and dual-
>layer disks was that the latter have TWICE the capacity.
>
>What I'm REALLY interested in is whether these figures reflect actual
>capacity, or include "overhead" space that will be reserved for the
>file-system.
>
>I back-up customer data on a fairly regular basis and it's getting to
>the point where this is starting to regularly exceed the capacity of
>a single DVD. I'm dumping a lot of it across the network to a Linux-
>based fileserver and what I'd like to do is run a zip archiver (well,
>probably 7-Zip) and have it break archives into appropriate sizes to
>span DVDs. I'll probably include a PDF with extraction instructions
>and maybe Windows- and Mac-based extraction apps.
>
>What size should I make the zip segments?

-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
Chair of HPUX SysAdmin SIG of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk