What type of media should I use?

[iSkippy]

Hi! I've been using Retrospect Express on my Mac for a little over a year now. It became worth its weight in gold late last year when it helped me (mostly) recover from a catastrophic hard disk failure.

 

Recently, I ended up frying my old FireWire CD-RW drive (long story), and just purchased a much faster drive. It's about time to back up my system again, and I'm wondering how I should proceed... that is, should I use CD-R discs or CD-RW discs for my backup.

 

When I restored from my first backups, which were on CD-RW discs, I noticed the presence of files I had long deleted from my disk. I had made a backup set, and updated it when I had made significant changes to my system. I thought updating my backup set would've prevented duplicate/zombie files, but perhaps I was wrong (may it have happened because two of my discs went bad?). When I had fully restored my system, I wiped the CD-RWs and wrote over the old backup set. This was painfully slow on the 4x rated media and on my 4x rewrite drive.

 

I was wondering if I should just get a cheap (price-wise, not quality-wise, though often they're the same) spindle of CD-Rs to perform future backups. This would allow my drive to write at incredibly fast speeds; however, if the backup set ends up too outdated, I may end up restoring long deleted files (or would I? I guess that's part of my question as well). CD-RWs would be a bit more expensive initially, but could be erased when the set becomes outdated.

 

So, I guess my question (finally!) is, what does everyone else use? Does it make sense to use CD-RWs when CD-Rs are relatively cheap? My two main concerns are price and time: obviously, CD-Rs would be fastest, but would I have to replace the media more often than if I used CD-RWs and erased them after a couple of backups?

 

Thanks in advance!

[paleolith]

Personally I use only CD-R. I have a stack of 100 or 200 or so accumulated over the past couple of years. I don't need those archival backups very often, but they can be life savers when I find I need a file I created years ago and deleted sometime later. Since I can get even good quality CD-R blanks for $0.20 or sometimes even $0.10 on sale (Office Depot is good here), and since I want to keep my backups for a long time, CD-RW has never made sense for me. In fact, the very fact that CD-R *cannot* be overwritten accidentally makes me feel a lot safer.

 

Edward