Toast 8: More space on your hard drive! By Dave Strom

Due to a slight mix-up (they thought I was a journalist instead of a technical writer), Roxio was kind enough to supply me with 2 free copies of Toast 8 (which I gave away at the SVMUG and SMUG raffles).

I already own Toast 8. Since I burn DVDs by the bale, I have found Toast 8 is handy when I want to burn or copy DVDs. Toast 8 can also do disc spanning (saves lots of hard drive space!) and video conversion.

* DISC SPANNING *

Disc spanning is the main reason I bought Toast. Do you have files or projects so big that you cannot fit them onto a single CD or DVD? I had lots of iMovie projects that were filling up my external hard drives.

Toast 8 lets you save files, projects, any folder and its contents, even if that data takes up more space than can fit on one disc. Toast 8 does this by spanning the files/projects/folders onto multiple discs. You can restore the spanned discs to a Mac or a Windows PC. The Mac or PC does not need Toast to do the restore.

I have cleared a lot of space on my hard drives, now that I can save my larger video projects onto DVDs. Toast 8 is a lot cheaper than buying ever-expanding hard drives.

1. In Toast, click the Data icon on the left.
2. Select your disc type from the DVD/CD/Blu-Ray pop-up menu just above the big red Burn button in the lower right corner.
3. Drag the files/projects/folders into the Toast window. Toast will tell you if they will take more than one disc to burn.
4. Click the big red Burn button in the lower right corner.
5. Feed in more discs when Toast asks for them.
6. Oh, and go back to step 1 and make two copies. In case you step on one of the discs later. Always keep your data in more than one place.
7. Now erase those files/projects/folders from your hard drive. You just saved lots of hard drive space.

Note: I have found that it is nice to have a fast DVD burner for this. Mine is only 2X, but with patience, I get the job done.

* VIDEO CONVERSION *

I have had video files that I wanted to watch in QuickTime player, and convert to other formats (like MP4). Toast 8 converts video.

1. In Toast 8, click the Video icon on the left.
2. Drag the video into the Toast window.
3. Select Disc: Export Video.
4. Select the video format (MP4, QuickTime, DV, etc.) or even audio format (AIFF, WAV, AAC, etc) to which you want to save your video file.
5. Click the Options button to select the size, frame rate, etc. of your converted video file (I suggest you start with using “current” wherever you can.)
6. Save your video file in its new format.

Note: VOB files, the video format used on DVDs, are notoriously hard to convert. I have found several VOBs that I could not convert in Toast.