This is a copy of an email that i sent to two panasonic tech support contractors, but i have heard nothing a week later. I would give Panasonic more time, but the excellent tech support people i developed a relationship with were either let go or reassigned. So i don't know that i will ever hear an answer.

From: Robert J Townley
Date: 2003/10/21 Tue PM 03:15:21 CDT
To: panasonic@bigbytecorp.com, pdiconlinehelp@panasonic.com
Subject: XCopy /d on UDF DVD-RAM does not work, on Fat32 it does


The short version:

With a Fat32 formatted DVD-RAM cartridge, xcopy /d works fine.
With a UDF formatted DVD-RAM, xcopy /d fails.
This seriously hurts our backup process.

The Long Version:

We have 1 LF-D200 series scsi based DVD-RAM drive. We have
been very happy with it for doing daily backups to the same set
of 5 cartridges every day for the last 3 years or so.
Before that we used the PD drive for a few years which we were
happy with as well.

So for six years, everyday we have been using the windows xcopy.
exe command with the "/D" switch. For example,

xcopy.exe c:\docs\*.* f:\docs\*.* /e /d /f /v

If you need more info on the command, use xcopy.exe /? at a cmd.
exe prompt and look in the windows help. It does not use the
NTVDM, so it is a 32 bit program, not a 16 bit DOS program.

The "/d" switch tells xcopy to only copy over destination files
that have a older date time stamp than the source files. Since
a very large chunk of our files do not change, this "/d" switch
saves our workers a great deal of time during our daily backup
process.

Our problem arose after we switched our DVD-RAM cartridges to
UDF Format from Fat32 so that they can be read and written in
multiple machines (Win98, Win2000, WinXP, Win2003). As you
know Fat32 formatted cartridges have all kinds of portability
problems from one Operating System to another.

The problem is that xcopy's "/d" switch is ignored and all
files are copied over whether they are out of date or not.
This increases our backup times from about 20 minutes to 120
minutes. In other words, even if a source file has not been
changed in several years, the backup copy on the UDF DVD-RAM is
overwritten every day.

Labels: DVD-RAM

  ¶ 8:45 PM