Why do you need a DVD burner?
DVD-recordable discs (DVD-Rs) are fast superceding CD-Rs as the backup format of choice. About 18 months ago a DVD burner would have cost you around $600, but nowadays they're very affordable – you can buy a good quality drive for less than $150.
But what exactly can you use a DVD burner for? The short answer is: everything you use a CD burner for, plus far more.
While they're the format of choice if you're creating your own digital home movies (particularly if you have a digital video camera), DVD-Rs also have the specific advantage of offering far more storage space than a CD-R – in fact, you can fit around the same amount of data on a DVD recordable as you could on six CD-Rs. They're therefore perfect for backing up files from your hard drive, such as large collections of digital photographs, mp3s, movies or other types of files that can quickly fill up your computer's hard disk space.
What you can do with a burner
Most recordable DVDs can hold 4.7 gigabytes (Gb) of data – approximately 4700Mb. However, that capacity is about to double as new “dual-layer” DVD burners and discs hit the market.
Either way, that makes a DVD burner much more suitable for backing up in general and, specifically, for storing lots of high-quality video. What's more, burners usually come with authoring software, which can easily create home-made video DVDs that can be played on many DVD players, so you (and others) can watch your home movies on TV. And generally, a DVD will last a long time and never lose its picture or audio quality, unlike VHS tapes, which deteriorate over time.
All DVD burners can also create CDs, so you still only need the one drive to handle all your needs, including audio CDs.
DVD formats
Until recently, when buying a DVD burner you'd have to consider whether to purchase a DVD+R (plus) or DVD-R (minus) version. These were competing disc formats supported by two groups of major manufacturers of DVD players and drives.
For most people, there was really very little difference between the formats, except that if you wanted to burn DVDs to be played in a DVD player, you had to be sure the burner and player supported the same format (plus or minus).
Thankfully, most new DVD burners now support both formats, although there are still some drives about that only burn plus discs, so this is definitely something to watch out for.
Like CD-R, both DVD+R and DVD-R discs are write-once formats, but they have re-writable versions, DVD+RW and DVD-RW, which are also supported by the burners. Where you'd use a DVD+R or DVD-R disc for a movie or an archive that you want to keep long-term, you would use DVD+RW or DVD-RW for backing up or short-term file moving. Yet another format that you may come across, DVD-RAM, is also a good option for backing up but it's not supported by many burners these days.
However, DVD+R9 is set to become increasingly common. It's a dual-layer version of DVD+R. Whereas DVD+R and DVD-R have only one data layer, DVD+R9 discs have two layers, which means that discs can hold up to 8.5Gb.