My Asus optical drive supports both DVD -/+ R and RW. Does it matter which DVD-R and RW blank disks I buy - minus or plus?

Jema

Depends on whether the disks will be used on equipment other than your computer. What you want, is the maximum compatibility with all devices that might need to read/write your DVDs. Once hardware is satisfied, make sure that any software that writes to DVDs is satisfied.

There are price differences and availability issues. In my area, -R and +RW are the most common.

For what do you plan to use your DVDs? Will you just be saving games and computer software? Will you be making movie copies or new movie disks to watch on a TV?

DVD-R and DVD+R are for archiving things. You can only write to them once. DVD-R is mainly for movies that are intended to be played on old TV DVD players that can't handle DVD+R discs. Old as in 15 or 20 years old. DVD+R is what is normally used for computer data.

DVD-RW allows you to erase what you've written on the disc so you can write something else to them. DVD-RW are read at a shallower angle than DVD-R or DVD+R and the DVD-RW discs may be harder to read on some drives.

Thanks Robert and Jenny100 for your replies.

To answer your questions, Robert: Any DVDs I create will be used on this XP system and possibly in the DVD read-only drive on my 98SE system whenever I get it reconnected.

I will not be creating any music or video DVDs or copying movies or making movies to watch on the TV.

The majority of drive images I make will be stored on my D partition, but periodically I will create a drive image on a DVDR. If my hard drive should go belly up, I will use the DVDR image to restore my system on a new hard drive without having to reinstall anything. Image for Windows supports both the -R and +R formats.

Also, if a game has been difficult to find, I may want to do a disk-to-disk copy of its DVD and use the copy to play the game so the original stays intact.

The DVDRWs I will use to drag and drop things I don't want to keep stored on my hard drive but want to have available when needed. This includes Word documents, games and software I've downloaded, and other game info (walkthroughs, patches, maps, etc.).

With this additional information in mind, what do you all recommend?

Thanks for your help.

Jema

DVD+R for the disc images or anything you want to keep.

DVD-RW for the drag-and-drop things you want to save temporarily.

Jema,
Don't buy any disks until you check which type of disks your Win98 read-only DVD unit can use.

Far as the +/- types, for forward compatibility the + versions might be best. However, you should read the info on DVD types at the following url to get a better understanding of the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_formats
Also read the info from the DVD forum and DVD+RW Alliance links on the above site.

From a practical point of view, whatever format keeps your oldest DVD drive happy will be just fine. Just keep in mind that it will take a very large number of DVDs to backup any modern hard drive. You will probably need to compress the files you want to save to zip or rar formats if they are not already self-extracting .exe files used to install programs.

Jenny100 and Robert, thank you for your replies.

Robert, the Sony read-only DVD drive in my 98SE computer reads both the - and + R/RW formats.

Image for Windows will make drive images of only the used space on a hard drive and can be set to compress the data. Since I don't keep a lot of stuff on my hard drive, once I finish cleaning out the garbage Win XP creates and hoards, I think the used space will fit on 2-3 DVDs. (And, yes, I will back up to DVD(s) everything I plan to delete before deleting it - just in case. )

Again, thank you both so much. I really appreciate all of your help and advice.

Jema