What type of disc do you use to hold digital photos?

Question

What type of Disc do you use to hold digital photos: CD-RW, DVD-R...etc.?

Answer 1

Uh, it depends on your burner. If you have a CD/RW drive then you can use CD-R or CD-RW. CD-R work great for one time burns, i.e. you can't write over the same space on the disc that you burned previously. CD-RW discs allow you to move (picture) files back and forth, add, delete, like on a computer drive. You have to format them before use though. Be careful as some cd players will not play CD/RW discs.

DVD's work the same basic way, if you have a DVD/RW drive. There are DVD-R and DVD+R for one time burns. If you want to use the discs in a DVD player then you may have to check what kind of DVD format(s) your player accepts. Should be in your owner manual or on the web somewhere. DVD burners should burn CD discs as well as DVD discs. This is a very brief description so you should look on the web for more info. There are tons of sites with good info.

p.s. The big difference is that a CD-R will hold 750Mb of data whereas a DVD-R holds like 4Gb. DVD-r are becoming very inexpensive. Dual Layer (DL) DVD's hold like 8Gb but they are much more expensive.

HTH

Answer 2

For now, I keep all my pictures on a seperate hard drive and I use an external hard drive to make frequent back-ups.
When those hard drives fill up, I'll get two more.
I'd rather not get started with CDs for back-ups, because I sometimes shoot more than 1GB in a week. Even with DVDs, that's just too much hastle.
When I share pictures with friends and family, I either put them on-line, or I use those CDs where you can print a picture on the CD itself, too
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For long term storage, keep in mind that CDs and DVDs (and even hard drives) are not permanent. You can't put them in a closet and expect them to still be good in 20 years. It's best to play it safe and copy the contents on to a new disk every year or two.