DVD burning/spanning

[WordBaron]

I honestly have no idea of the scope of what I am asking, or if it's even possible given OS and media capabilities, but here goes nothing...

I have over 65GB of original source media that I would like to backup to several DVDs. When I select the media and use the XYPlorer "Copy To" functionality it fails when going to the DVD R/W drive indicating that "Drive E: does not exist.\n\nThe file operation will not happen." This is very likely due to the fact that I have not formatted the media that is currently in the drive. (Single Layer RW DVD+R)

My question is, would it be possible to send a large amount of data to a DVD drive such as this have it format the media (or prompt to format it as Windows does) and then when it has copied over as much data as it can for one DVD, prompt to enter the second, third, forth, etc. piece of media and then continue? If this is not possible, do you know of any software that can perform this function? I know that Zip programs such as WinZip can span disks but I truly do not want to try to zip up 65 GB of data as I believe it'll take forever and probably render my machine useless in the process.

Thank you in advance for any thought or consideration you give to this request.

(If it matters to this discussion, I am currently running Win Vista - Enterprise Edition.)
WordBaron

[zer0]

I think that your best bet, without having to resort to 3rd-party software prior to burning, is a script that would loop through the items, add up sizes of files as it goes along and once it reaches the specified amount it puts those files in a folder called DVD1 (or as requested) and restarts the size count but continues to loop through the remaining files. You can then burn those folders to back up your data.