Archiving Files on CD - Compress with WinRAR

This section describes a tutorial on how to compress files with WinRAR to archive them on a data CD.

If you have a lots of personal files on your computer system, you should consider to archive or backup them to a CD to avoid any losses if something happen to your computer.

One easy way to backup your files is to copy the folder where your files are located to a CD. But this could lead to problems like:

A better way of archiving your personal files to a CD is compress all directories and files into a single archive file with WinRAR. Then copy the single archive file to the CD. The advantages are obvious:

Here is what I did compress all of my personal files into 3 archive files to be copied to a data CD. My personal files are under the 5 folders: \herong\file2002, \herong\file2003, ..., \herong\file2006.

1. Create a work directory C:\archive.

2. Run the following commands in a command window:

C:\>cd \herong
C:\herong>mkdir \archive

C:\herong>WinRAR a -afrar -r \archive\file2002.rar file2002\*.*
   (Using the 8-3 file name format to avoid restoring problems.
   (WinRAR progress window shows up.
   (The compression process takes a couple of minutes.

C:\herong>WinRAR a -afrar -r \archive\file2003.rar file2003\*.*

...

C:\herong>WinRAR a -afrar -r \archive\file2006.rar file2006\*.*

C:\herong>copy \progra~1\winrar\WinRAR.exe \archive\WinRAR.exe
        1 file(s) copied.
   (I want to put a copy WinRAR.exe on the CD too.

C:\herong>dir \archive
<DIR>          .
<DIR>          ..
    10,577,076 file2002.rar
   113,907,373 file2003.rar
   121,605,487 file2004.rar
   129,867,837 file2005.rar
   333,239,038 file2006.rar
       915,968 WinRAR.exe
6 File(s)    710,112,779 bytes
2 Dir(s)  21,970,386,944 bytes free

I got 6 archive files with 710,112,779 bytes / 1024 / 1024 = 678 MB. It perfectly fits on one CD-R (data CD).

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Audio CD (Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD-DA) Format

 Audio CD (Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD-DA) Players

 Audio CD (Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD-DA) Rip Music

 WAV Audio File Format

 MP3, MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, Encoding Format

 Burning MP3 Music to Audio CD

 Windows Sound Recorder

 ISO 9660 Standard for Data CD

Recording Data on CD

Archiving Files on CD - Compress with WinRAR

 Installing Final Burner

 Creating ISO 9660 Image with FinalBurner

 Checking ISO 9660 Image with FinalBurner

 Burning ISO 9660 Image to CD with FinalBurner

 Validating the Finished Data CD

 Unused Space on Writable CDs

 VCD (Video CD) Standard

 DVD (Digital Video Disc) Standard Format

 TOC (Table Of Contents) on CDs

 IsoBuster - A Nice CD GUI Tool

 MPlayer - The Movie Player

 vStrip - Rip and Manipulate DVD VOB Files

 mpgtx - Manipulating MPEG Files

 CD/DVD - File Name Extension and Format Types

 References

 Full Version in PDF/ePUB