Greetings to all,

The last 2 days, I have been organizing myself to backup my PC data. 

Part of the reason was to remove some very old data from my desktop PC. 
The other reason was that I didn't remember when I did my last full backup. 

BTW, I have a question (and I want truthful! answers) how long has it been
since you did a full backup of your data (pictures, music, eMail, ...)? 

One of the things I wanted to backup was the entire content of each of my
flash memory cards (yes, I know that all of that data had already been copied
to the HDD on my PC -- but, how sure was I that I actually got every image???). 

I was a little surprised to find that 11 flash memory cards amounted to 3.6GBy
Since I didn't want to use 5 or 6 CD-R for each backup set, (and the time it
would take), I used 4.7GBy 16x CD-R disks -- it took about 15 minutes for each
of the 2 disks I made. BTW, I always make 2 copies on CD-R or DVD -- I figure
that when i need to use backup, at least one of those disks will be OK.  ... and
if I never need to look at the alternate copy, that would be more OK than not
having an alternate copy that I did need.  (groan!)

That got me to thinking about my backup cost ... and I checked my favorite
supplier: Computer Geeks.  Here are the pleasant results ...

CD burners IDE               $14 to $23
CD Burners USB              $18
DVD burners IDE/SATA   $23 to $99
DVD burners USB            $38 to $60

CD-R 50 48x - 52x            $8 to $17
CD-R 100 48x                   $30 to $34
DVD R/50 8x                     $14 to $22
DVD R/100 8x                   $39
DVD R/100 16x                 $39

Hardly any cost difference between CD vs DVD or between Internal (IDE)
and external (USB).  Of course, the external drives are easier to install. 

Using DVD media gives a real saving over using CD media. 

I'd be interested in hearing your opinions about reliability. 

--
Martin