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I have a 900 MB file and I'd like to safely archive it on a DVD. As you can see 3/4 of the space will be empty. Besides the obvious possibility to just write the same file with 4 different names is there any other (more useful) solution?

Of course the best possibility would be a totally transparent one, some secret clause of ISO9660 protocol which would seamlessly make it readable on any computer without additional software.

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I have found DVDisaster, a program that does just what I need. OK, for recovery you need the program itself, otherwise no additional files on the disk (only adds some hidden area within the track).

I also tested it with ImageBurn as suggested by documentation. There was a little size mismatch. Re-grabbing the DVD, the image file showed 00 bytes at the end, exactly 11 * 2048 bytes.

From this i surmise that ImageBurn just appended some empty sectors after the image (which sould not cause any problems) may be for compatibility reasons (yeah 2014080 looks more standard than 2014069).

My original image was 1.3 GB (I decided no to compress the data). DVDisaster automatically used the whole disk for error correction data which resulted in 200% redundancy (that is over the amount of original data). The resulting image became 1.3 + 2.6 which is around 4 Gigs. (If you are working with files the maximum possible redundancy is around 65%, so note that the "full disk" mode goes above that).

I did not damage the disk so I can not report about recovering capabilities. May be I will vandalize a DVD later.

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    dvdisaster is my personal favorite program for this sort of thing. If you've got enough empty space, you could put some kind of ECC (e.g. par2/MultiPar) files in the ISO first and then use dvdisaster on top of that for extra protection.
    – afrazier
    Jun 7, 2011 at 17:05

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