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For a couple years I have been storing all my important data on a CD-RW using InCD. Things like financial data, legal documents, correspondence, etc. I had been burned by hard drive failures before and I wanted to make sure my critical data was safe.

I was using InCD 3.xx and never had a problem. Then I switched to InCD 4.xx and the problems started. Reading and writing to the CD-RW started taking much longer than it used to. My computer would get very sluggish whenever accessing the drive. Then one day InCD refused to recognize the disc at all. I tried go back to InCD 3.xx but it didn't help. My guess is that InCD 4.xx has corrupted the disc and the data is gone forever. I would advise everyone NOT to use InCD for important data.

If that was your only copy, your misfortune. Condolences. But that won't get your data back and I have no answer, but for the ounce of prevention.

Regardless of how good or bad InCD is, I trust nothing. Everything I have of value, like family photos and good music (C&W, of course), is backed up on a second hard drive and CD-Rs for double redundancy. I only use InCD as a temporary collection point prior to burning out to CD-Rs.

The CD-RW drive I have been using is a Lite-On LTR-52246S (firmware version 6S0F). The disc I have been using came with the drive and is branded by Lite-On.

I remembered that I had another blank CD-RW laying around from several years ago when I bought a sampler pack of optical media. So I thought I'd try using InCD with this disc. I formatted it with the verify box checked and it went suspiciously quickly (maybe a minute). Then I tried copying a 90MB file to the disc. After about 5 minutes I got a bunch of error messages and it looked like only 47MB were copied. So I moved the disc to my DVD-RW drive which is a Plextor PX-708A with firmware version 1.08. I reformatted it in that drive and again it went suspiciously quickly. I tried copying the 90MB file and, again, I got a bunch of error messages partway through. This time, however, the drive itself completely disappeared from Windows Explorer. I could hear the disc spinning in the drive but it wouldn't open when I pressed the eject button. I opened task manager and killed the InCD process but I still couldn't eject the disc. I rebooted the computer (soft boot) and tried ejecting the disc during the POST and it still wouldn't eject (I could still hear it spinning). Finally I hit the power key to shut off the computer, turned it back on, and then I could eject the disc.

Totally give up Packet writing. InCD or Drag-to-Disk. The earlier the better.

Get used to writing multi-session CD's. Remember to tick 'verify writen data' option in Nero!

bimbla.

I totally agree with bimbla on this. Packet writing is just too unreliable - I gave up on it years ago. I backup my important files on DVD+R, and for transporting temporary files between home and office, I use a 512MB USB flash drive.

I agree,don't use packet writing.
As for the problem use IsoBuster to recover.

I used to get some corrupt files on the disc when using InCD 4. I realized that this was due to Norton Anti-Virus scanning the files and corrupting some of them when they were being copied to the disc. Since disabling the Anti-Virus software when copying files to disc, I didn't notice a corrupt file again.

I thought that InCD 4 verifies files after copying them to disc, otherwise it should have determined the corrupt files, which it didn't.

Maybe Nero and Symantec (authors of Norton Anti-Virus) can fix this bug.

Always make more than one backup of your files!

New update to InCD 4 released today.

http://www.nero.com/en/update.php?pak=5

Steve335 wrote:Maybe Nero and Symantec (authors of Norton Anti-Virus) can fix this bug.

Indeed. And our both companies attend the regular IFS Plug Fests at Seattle and work together to resolve interaction issues.