Have you ever needed to archive a bunch of files to CD or DVD and not cared about the order of the files, only archiving them as efficiently as possible?
Last weekend I finally decided to archive around 43GB worth of video files to DVD-R discs. In a perfect world, I would have been able to organize my files, keeping all of my episodes of The Office or My Name Is Earl together on the same disc. However, the real world just doesn’t work that way. I don’t have enough hard drive space to keep entire seasons of my favorite shows prior to burning, so the 43GB worth of files was a hodgepodge of five episodes of this and six episodes of that. And with video files being so large (175MB for a half-hour show to 700MB for a one-hour British show), it’s nearly impossible to keep them together on one disc. One season of a British show like Life On Mars is simply too big for one disc, and while five or six episodes of My Name Is Earl will easily fit on a CD-R, it’d be a waste of a DVD-R disc to burn 650MB to a 4700MB DVD. The best one can hope for if you try to figure out which files could be burned to which disc is a loose organization of your files; at worst, one gets a huge headache trying to figure it all out.
But what if you didn’t care about organization? What if you had 43GB of files that you just wanted to burn as efficiently as possible, with every disc as full as data as can be? Well, if that’s what you want, look no further than my new best friend SizeMe. This program couldn’t be much simpler, folks: after installing it, you open the app and choose your archive media from a drop-down box (media supported include floppy, 250MB zip disk, 650 and 700MB CD-R, and DVD 5, 9, 10 and 18). You then tell SizeMe which folder you want scanned. Before you can say “done!”, the program will have made a complete list of the most efficient way to burn your discs. You now have two options: if your disc burning software supports drag-and-drop, you can drag “Disc 01” of SizeMe’s results to the burning software’s layout pane and burn it to disc. However, if you’d prefer to organize now and burn later, your second option is for SizeMe to create ISO files of your stuff, which you can mount in virtual drives or burn to disc later on. SizeMe keeps the contents of subfolders together, so all of my movies with subtitles were kept intact in subfolders on DVD-R discs. About the only complaint I have with SizeMe is that there’s no way to tell it to keep files with the same name but different extension together (for example, freaks.and.geeks.s01e07.avi and freaks.and.geeks.s01e07.nfo), so my NFO files are strewn about over 9 DVD-R discs instead of being kept with the original file. But it’s a small price to pay to be able to clear out a bunch of hard drive space as quickly (and efficiently!) as possible.
SizeMe is for Windows only and is absolutely free. Check out the site by clicking here.