Shoulder Bicep Elbow Arm

Two scenarios – at work, I burn 'em like crazy to make bootable Ghost images of Users' computers – it blows up, it's back to new again in 20 minutes.
At home, I make backups of data for storage and transport to the office. I have had a RW drive for 3 years now, and I don't believe I have ever used a RW disc (although I have a box of them). Too expensive and slower…. or is it just me? My kids keep wanting to burn copies of their friends audio CDs, but they just don't get the concept of a copyright…. or am I the only person on earth that believes people should be paid for their creative work (my kids seem to think so)?
Chris

I don't use them at all. CD-R's are cheap enough, I just burn a new disk to keep all of the wonderful things I have downloaded someplace in case my computer crashes. I am the Zip queen.
My mother uses the CD-RW's so that she can back up her computer. She also uses them when she is scanning images for her Genealogy stuff and wants to just add 2-3 more to a disk.

I make backup copies of my music CD's to carry in my car. About 2 years ago, all my CD's (100+) got stolen from my car. After having to rebuy all my Cd's :(, I vowed to keep the originals at home and carry the copies with me. According to my understanding of copyright issues, it's OK.
Also, I make Ghost's of all my home pc's and backup my utilities.

CDR's are sooo cheap nowadays but I don't write of CDRW totally. They have their uses.
I have a few high speed ones (10* write) ok slower than my drives CDR 12* speed but what the hell…
They are great for backing up MY DOCUMENTS folder to CDRW before doing a reinstall – or testing out a new CD master – if you are into that sort of thing – personal projects etc.
They still have their use!
I've just reinstalled my network and they have come in very handy indeed!
Just mark the disk BACKUP CD and forget about it – update it when you like!

PS. Isn't NORTON GHOST 2002 (With its NTFS support) a life saver?
Have windows on drive C (NTFS). CADDY ON DRIVE D (FAT32) and you can ghost your system to drive D as your backup – restore full system in mins!
Or.. if on one drive… SAY C: (NTFS) 30 GIGS…
Use partition magic – resize NTFS down – create a new FAT32 partition and USE GHOST again to do partition-partition – works just like above and you can restore it as well!
I've built a front-end program that runs GHOST from a floppy boot disk and has all the backup -restore options in the menu!
You'd need to contact me for more info though.. (www.savemypc.com – email is there!)
What do you think that site is for eh???
I plan to do a backup.restore service for people – copy of ghost included in the price! 12 month contracts available!
end of advert… ;-)

I should have added to the above (the original point I was going to make! doh!), that together with GHOST – CDR's and CDRW disks especially are a lifesaver! I've backed my whole windows xp installation up to 4 CDRW disks (first one bootable with menu!). Nice!

Personally, I use CD-RWs to move back-ups and archives off my hard drive and onto CD. I conceptualize burning custom CD's onto CD-RW and then using our standalone CD burner to copy them onto a CD-R. That way, any mess ups are caught on the RW instead of turning another R into a frisbee. I do admit though that since CD-Rs are so cheap now, I have wasted a couple by burning just a few files I needed for a job. Should I have used CD-RW? Probably.

I use CD-RWs and CD-Rs to backup and transfer data to other computers, and to make music CDs. I also use CD-Rs a lot to make VideoCDs of home movies and videos I download off the net, which will play in my set top DVD player.

Chris –
The question as I see it is why RW versus R. And for me, the answer is mostly R.
For those who like the [maybe mental] security of taking home that “disk” of current work – just in case – an RW allows them to treat it as a “disk” that each day they can save to or erase from – always take home and rarely need to change.
Sort of like the old reel-to-reel tape days – how often [if ever] did you erase the tape and re-use it.
However, given a “standard” father-son-grandfather backup situation [can you say 19], I can see the use of RWs, and can even understand the cost-effective break-even point of some high number of cycles. But considering the non-dollar “library” cost – I would still probably go for Rs, marked “destroy after xx/xx/xx.'

I have a friend who uses the RW's for playing Old Radio programs. He takes the MP3's, converts them to CD audio, and puts 2 or 3 on a CD. AFter he has listened to them he just rewrites with some new ones.

I use CD-Rs for backup copies to protect my originals.

Ditto what everyone's said. I use CDRs for music and everything else; the only CDRWs I've ever used are the couple of freebies that came with my burner. In theory CDWRs are a convenient way of updating data (like Documents and the like), but I've stuck with CDRs because they are so cheap.

At the radio station I work at, I got my General Manager to move from analog (tapes and carts) to digital (minidiscs and computer,) but I couldn't get him and the engineer to add our production computer to the two-computer network set up by Metro Networks for our wire service.
Since the computer had a CD-RW drive, we ended up producing commercials and programs on it, saving it to the hard drive as an archive, then copying to a CD-RW and moving it onto the main computer (which had a normal CD-ROM drive, so the transfer was one-way only.) This gave us the ability to use the CD as a glorified 450 MB floppy, and not have to use a billion CD-Rs (we transfered .wav files between 5-10 times a day, normally en masse.)
Needless to say, though, CD-RWs don't really like audio files, especially when you constantly add and subtract. A disc normally lasted four weeks before crapping out on us, if that. By August I finally drove myself to Best Buy and bought the cat 5 cable for the engineer and got him to install it that day.
I tell you, after that many uses copying to a CD-RW is SLOOOOOOOOOW. No more of that now, though. :)