Files waiting to be burned to cd, seems complicated?

[Amanda]

Lately, when I have a file ready to be burned to a CD or DVD, a message pops
up on my desktop saying so, and "click here to see the file." I've seen this
in the past too, and when I'd click on it, it would show me the contents on
the cd or dvd I have in the drive, and at the top of the window the file
ready to be written would show. And I could select "burn" and it would burn
to the disc, and apparently delete itself from the temp folder after it was
done. But NOW when I click on the message, it shows me the contents of the cd
or dvd, but does not show the file waiting to burn.
In order to burn the file to the disc, I have to navigate separately through
10 folders to find the Temporary burn folder, then highlight the file and
choose burn. It does not delete itself afterwards, I have to manually delete
it when done.
Running Vista Ultimate, single user computer.

Is it really this complicated to back up a file to a cd?

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Amanda.

My experience in burning DVDs is limited but, since nobody else replied,
I'll make a couple of comments.

I was quite shocked after backing up my Quicken files to CD/DVD with WinXP a
few years ago to find that those files did NOT make it to the CD disk!
Quicken said the backup was successful - but it lied! Or WinXP lied to
Quicken! In any case, the files were simply waiting, as you said, in a
"to-be-burned" folder on my hard drive. It took a few extra steps to
actually move those files from my hard drive to the CD disk. I wrote a
batch file to do this, but the process became so cumbersome that I stopped
backing up to CDs altogether. That's when USB flash drives became widely
available and I've switched to those for regular backups, with CD/DVD used
only for archives - and I don't do those as often as I should.

Vista includes a new tool called Windows DVD Maker; you should see it on the
All Programs menu. I used that just once - to burn a movie I had edited
Windows Movie Maker (also included in Vista Ultimate) after downloading it
with Windows Media Center (also in Ultimate). That worked very well. But I
haven't tried sending my Quicken backups to CD/DVD recently.

I know this doesn't address your question directly, but maybe you can find
something useful in it.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64)

 

[Amanda]

well, although you did not answer the DVD question, you DID solve my
immediate problem which is making a back-up in Quickbooks. THANK YOU!!!!!
I had not thought to try a flash drive, as I only recently got a flash drive
and had not experimented with it much yet. But you are right, the quickbooks
program saves directly to it (as it USED TO do with a cd) and I am back in
business. THANKS--
-
Amanda B