05-27-2013, 12:50 PM

I have some personal dvd's that i saved off onto our iMac using the DVD/CD Master (.cdr) format for each disk.
Now I want to put all the .cdr's into a compressed disk on the iMac HD. This will have other .cdr's added to it time to time, so it must be expandable.
Which might be the best format to use? I was considering the Sparse Bundle Disk Image but not sure if this actually compresses and expands or decreases in size depending on content. What about .dmg or .zip? All ideas would be appreciated.

05-27-2013, 05:39 PM

Your disk images aren't going to compress much more than they are already, so I doubt there's much mileage in compressing them further. You can test this by zipping a cdr and comparing the cdr file size with the zip.

Is there any particular reason you want to put them in another container?

05-27-2013, 06:02 PM

Compressing a compressed file usually results in a larger file than the source. You can indeed use something like a ZIP to just keep all of your CDR together, but expect that ZIP file to take up more room. You're better of keeping a folder structure that you can use to organize your CDRs..

05-28-2013, 11:44 PM

Thank you both for your advice.

Originally Posted by mrplow

Your disk images aren't going to compress much more than they are already, so I doubt there's much mileage in compressing them further. You can test this by zipping a cdr and comparing the cdr file size with the zip.

Is there any particular reason you want to put them in another container?

First I was considering using the Time Machine to backup the CDRs onto my external disk drive. But that means I'd have to reconfigure the "Exceptions" each time I wanted to run one disk or the other. (Time Machine does its backups onto my Time Capsule disk. The CDRs will be on an external LaCie disk drive I have.

The reason for thinking of a compressed container for the CDRs was to save further disk space as the CDRs can be quite large in byte size. But, since it will not be to any advantage, I will just use a folder structure, possibly by author_name/audiobook_name. Thanks again for getting back to me on this.

05-30-2013, 08:33 AM

I hereby state that this thread should be closed.

BG