Very basic DVD question

sloughflint

To record ( and overwrite if need be) on a pc or laptop dvd drive, should a +rw or-rw be bought?What's the dfference?
TIA

Donnie

Of course it depends on your machine, though I'm sure that you'll be safe with DVD-RW.

asininity

It doesn't matter its the RW thats important re-writer.

Sput2001

sloughflint wrote: »

To record ( and overwrite if need be) on a pc or laptop dvd drive, should a +rw or-rw be bought?What's the dfference?
TIA

+RW and -RW are different types of recording format. Unless your writer is particularly old, it's pretty well bang on certain that it wil be able to cope with either.

d900

i am a big fan of -rw

d900

i dunno why - i spose i got into burning things to dvd ages ago and at the time the -rw spec seemed to be more reliable and more devices supported them.

its all changed now so not an issue
when buying dvd's you really do get what you pay for you can spend 10p a disk or you can spend £1 a disk

what do you plan to back up?

20000RPM

If you're backing up important documents, you could put them on the same disc twice, by simply putting them in a folder then copying them into a differently named folder, then burning them both to the disc. That way, if a particular physical part of the disc gets damaged in some way, the files will also exist on another physical part of the disc.

Also, think about how confidential the documents you're saving are. If you were to lose the DVD, someone else would easily be able to read anything you put on there. You could use encryption such as http://www.gnupg.org/ or http://www.truecrypt.org/ to prevent anyone else being able to read your files from the disc.

Not sure how secure it is, but http://www.7-zip.org/ allows very easy encryption by adding a password to an archive. Winzip also does this, but I've read that it's very insecure.

20000RPM

sloughflint wrote: »

Excellent point. Many thanks for this.

No worries! After HMRC lost my details along with 25million other people's, it made me think more about my own data security.