DVD backup dup'ing issues + which software

[rooter]

hey howdy,
pretty new + totally excited about burning dvd's, movies etc. I get stuck and confused pretty quickly these days...
The most important issue I've had (and heard mixed answers on) is that my OS X.4 came as a bundled DVD and the darn thing is over 5gigs. (therefore won't fit on a DVD that I buy -- I do not have a doublesided burner. Now, I am one of the biggests klutz you'll meet; and try as I might + do, I have ruined cd after cd after DVD and so on. Having a backup copy of my system is a must --> sooo what do I do?
I called apple several times and they didn't understand the whole, I need a smaller DVD of X.4, or the people I spoke with didn't.
The last time I called, for another reason, the apple-phone-answerer said, oh, just download the latest combo disk image and burn it on a DVD, it will be smaller than a DVD and you can simply burn it as bootable... Does this sound right, seem doable? What the heck else do I do?! Plus, why can't I get another copy of the disk, if I bought it! (let alone the whole computer it came on?!?)
Would I do that in DiskUtilities, or Popcorn or? (is Popcorn best only for movies?) I can't compress the X.4 DVD that's 5+gigs can I -- that wouldn't work would it?
And secondly, as stated above, I really need back ups of everything I have; and I've just started making dups of my DVD movies. I've only had one hang up so far; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the new one > great) (MacTheRipper 2.6.6)any ideas?!?
And I just tried to burn Ice Age - which ripped just fine, or said it did, and played fine from a file on my cpu, but Popcorn 1.0.2 has an error reading:
Popcorn not able to handle the contents of this VIDEO_TS folder. With nothing else, no suggestions or reasons -- well, maybe yall know what that means, but I don't.
I ripped it on MactheRipper 2.6.6 and it did not report any errors... any ideas?!
[I'm running 10.4.3 on a 1.42ghz ibook w 1gb]
thanks much!

 

[Ric]

Hi there,

Apple did have a 'swap' program...you could swap your retail DVD of OS X Tiger for CD version's (+$12) from memory...this would then allow you to backup the CD's if you wanted...but this would mean buying the Retail version first !

If you have an external drive, make a Disk Image of your Tiger disk there.

At least you have a copy of it. Whenever I buy any new software I always creat a Disk Image of it first to an external drive...then install. This way I know I have a good backup ! A lot of software can be reinstalled from the disk image and the originals are kept somewhere safe.

I'll have to have a think about your Tiger (bundled) DVD... from what I can see Toast will back it up over multiple DVD's (data spanning) other software will do this as well.

But that doesn't help if you need to burn it to a new DVD incase of emergency...

The only thing I can think of at the minute it to use a Program called Pacifist and extract all the bits needed to make your own Tiger (bootable/installable) DVD.

I'm not sure how practical/possible this would be...

I have an original Panther/PowerBook DVD somewhere I'll have a look to see if that is a dual layer, if it is then I can try and see if I can extract just the bits needed...

Apple, obviously have got the wrong end of the stick, yes you can download the 10.4.4 update and burn to disk...but this is just that the update. You can not do a 'complete' reinstall from that.

As for using MTR or Popcorn, I don't think it would work. Popcorn is reencoding the datastream using MPEG encoding to squash the movie onto the new target DVD...same with MTR.

I'll have a play compressing etc later tonight !

Some DVD's especially newer ones are encrypted differently and you have to wait for MTR to be updated...sometimes just doing a restart and trying again works. Leave the Mac alone whilst MTR is doing it's stuff.

There is an update to Popcorn, http://www.roxio.com/en/support/popcorn/software_updates.jhtml

I haven't updated to it yet but it may help. I haven't found Popcorn to be very consistant...

Update to 10.4.4 as well this is a bit more stable.

I'll see if I can come up with anything else later...

regards

Ric