Live File System is the term

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uses to describe the

packet writing Packet writing (or incremental packet writing, IPW) is an optical disc recording technology used to allow write-once and rewritable CD and DVD media to be used in a similar manner to a floppy disk from within the operating system. Details Pa ...

method of creating discs in

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and later, which allows writeable

optical media An optical disc is a flat, usuallyNon-circular optical discs exist for fashion purposes; see shaped compact disc. disc-shaped object that stores information in the form of physical variations on its surface that can be read with the aid o ...

to act like

mass storage In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. In general, the term ''mass'' in ''mass storage'' is used to mean ''large'' in relation to contemporaneous hard disk drive ...

by replicating its file operations. Live File System lets users manage files on recordable and rewriteable optical discs inside the

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage computer files, files and folder (computing), folders. The most common Computer file#Operations, operations performed on files or groups of files incl ...

with the familiar workflow known from mass storage media such as

USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...

s and external

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s. Files can be added incrementally to the media, as well as modified, moved and deleted. These discs use the UDF file system. The supported UDF versions for usage as a live file system are UDF 1.50, UDF 2.00, UDF 2.01, UDF 2.50 for

CD-R CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can only be Write once read many, written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) ...

CD-RW RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format introduced by Ricoh in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, r ...

, DVD±R, DVD±RW and BD-RE, and UDF 2.60 for BD-R. However even if UDF 1.50 and above can be read, only the plain UDF build may be supported and not necessarily either the VAT or Spared UDF builds required for full compatibility.

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for example only supports the original UDF 1.50 variation and not the Virtual Allocation Table build for remapped physical blocks; something not all optical drive units fully implement either. The ''Live File System'' option is used by default by AutoPlay when formatting/erasing a CD/DVD -R or -RW.

Compatibility

Older Windows versions do not have support for reading the latest UDF versions. If users create DVD/CDs in Windows Vista using UDF 2.50, these may not be readable on other systems, including Windows XP and older (pre-Mac OS 10.5) Apple systems unless a third-party UDF reader driver is installed. To ensure compatibility of disks created on Windows Vista, UDF 2.01 or lower should be selected.

Notes

References

{{Windows-stub Computer storage media Optical computer storage media Windows disk file systems

Compatibility

Notes

See also

References