Howdy, Michael, or anyone else willing to advise,

Like other folks with a slave hard drive, I run a weekly Drive Image
7.03 backup in DVD-sized chunks to my slave D: Once every few months,
I write the chunks to DVD+RWs for off-site emergency backups. (I was
following a recommendation I had found here in the alt.backup-software
newsgroup to back up to hard drive in chunks and write my own
DVDs, since DI7 takes so long to write them directly.)

After my WinXP SP2 upgrade, I decided to test my strategy.

I let a post-SP2 backup run, and wrote the four 3.9GB and one 1.7GB
chunks to five DVD+RWs with the little "Sonic Record Now" program that
came installed on my new (April) Dell 4600. (Nero 6 is just flaky when
it comes to DVD+RWs here, and Sonic is very easy).

I then deleted the hard drive slave D: chunks and copied the five
respective DVDs chunks in their place. Now all looked as it had before
the deletion. I ran DI7's "PQIBrowser," and a tree came up instantly,
restored randomly-selected files without a flaw, etc., giving me
confidence in the basic backup routine.

Then I tried browsing the DVDs. As DI users know, there's a *lot*
of disk swapping for the DI browser to build its image. I got to the
fourth swap and the browser crashed. It had worked fine a couple of
months back on an older set of DVD+RWs *that Drive Image itself had
written* in it's interminable fashion, but the browser apparently
balked at these copies of chunks written by another DVD-writing
program?

OR -- did my decision to include the little 2KB *.sv2i index(?) file
(always the last file written by DI7) on each DVD+RW in hopes of
facilitating browsing (an admitted stab in the dark) throw the program
off?

Michael K., or anyone else: do you have any suggestions to improve on
this? I'm not unhappy with the performance, but eager to learn how I
crashed the browser: writing my own DVDs, or including the little 2KB
tag *.sv2i on each disk?

I'd also love to know why the un-numbered file (ie.  no "_s01" etc.
included in the filename) is considered the "first media" that the
browser asks for. I don't understand the system where
"C_Drive007_s01," the first DVD-sized chunk written (according to time
stamp in Windows Explorer) is not the "first," while the *last* file
written, the no "_s0?" C_Drive007.v2i is considered "first." It's
confusing. Duh.

And, finally, was anyone else forced to uninstall Microsoft .NET
Framework 1.1 and replace it with MS .NET Framework 1.0.3705
from the DI7 installation CD in order to properly view the
menu screen (complete with "Backup Jobs" tab, etc.? I couldn't
get the entire screen until tech support had me perform this oddity.

Many thanks,

Travis

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