Live File System is the term

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

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 ...

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, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and later, which allows writeable

optical media In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data (bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surfaces. ...

to act like mass storage 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 files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or print ...

with the familiar workflow known from mass storage media such as

USB flash drive A USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since fir ...

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 platters coated with magn ...

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 optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can be written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) are readable by most CD readers manufactured prior to the int ...

CD-RW CD-RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital optical disc storage format introduced in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, require specialized readers that have sens ...

DVD±R DVD±R (also DVD+/-R, or "DVD plus/dash R") is not a separate DVD format, but rather is a shorthand term for a DVD drive that can accept both of the common recordable DVD formats (i.e. DVD-R and DVD+R). Likewise, DVD±RW (also written as DVD±R/W, ...

, DVD±RW and BD-RE, and UDF 2.60 for BD-R. The ''Live File System'' option is used by default by

AutoPlay AutoPlay, a feature introduced in Windows 98, examines newly discovered removable media and devices and, based on content such as pictures, music or video files, launches an appropriate application to play or display the content. It is closely rel ...

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