Originally Posted by Rich LePage

Seen the same thing with DVDs used for data backups. No surprise that cheapo media is not reliable -- but the one brand that seems to work well time and again for those has been Verbatim. We have many DVD drives, from 4x to 16x, mostly use them for data backup which is always fully verified after writing (as a separate verify pass, using Backup Exec). The Verbatims seem to be very reliable, most others, not. Will have to see how they hold up over time as storage media-- but I did restore a project done a few years ago recently that was backed up to DVD and it worked out fine. With really critical stuff that is very likely to be reworked years later, I back up to both DVDs and DDS data Dats which is what I used before the DVDs, and usually run 2 sets of DVDs too just in case. I get paranoid that way!