CD-RW Erase Time

[Guest]

I am using Retrospect Express 4.3 and Driver Update 2.5.101 and backing up to CD-RW media. I find that when I decide to do a Recycle Backup, that the erase cycle for the CD-RW's runs about 10 minutes each. This gets old real fast when you have a dozen members of a set. I am using a Yamaha CRW-2100S which is a 16x10x40 burner.

 

 

 

This may just be a characteristic of the way CD-RW's work, but I want to confirm this. Before I was using CD-RW's, I was using Syquest disks. When I did a Recycle Backup with these, Retrospect did not do a full reformating, it did a simple erase which was very fast. CD-RW's recycling seems to be doing the equivalent of a full formating and not a simple erase prior to beginning to write the new information. I can understand a long cycle the first time the CD-RW media is used because of the non-standard formatting of the media, but after it has already been used for a backup set, 10 minutes each gets to be pretty painful.

 

 

 

Does anybody have a way around this, or is this just the nature of the beast?

 

 

 

Thanks.