Tasty Toast Backup Feature

A while back, Derrick Story wondered how valuable Roxio Toast still was, given the disc-burning features built in to Mac OS X.

Well, Toast hasn't grown moldy; Roxio added a bunch of features right after Derrick's post came out. I've covered two obscure but very cool audio ones: the ability to make high-resolution and surround-sound DVDs.

Here's another tasty Toast feature I recently had a chance to use: disc spanning. When I assembled all my O'Reilly files in preparation for a move, they totaled 21GB — too big to fit on a DVD. Toast's disc-spanning feature automatically spread the files across five DVDs, adding a cross-platform browser program to each disc. That meant I could pop any of the discs into my Mac or Windows computers, run the program, and see which file was on which disc. To transfer a single file or an entire folder to the computer, all I had to do was insert the appropriate disc, highlight the item, and click a button.

Although Toast compresses the files themselves into a monolithic archive, individual files don't span multiple discs unless they're too big to fit on a single disc. That means that even if one disc in the series goes bad, you'll still be able to recover everything on the other discs.

Of course, the browser program may not run on future operating systems, so I'll continue to make backups with discrete files. But for a quick backup I knew I'd be using soon, Toast's disc-spanning feature was excellent.