Kleetus: :) I've never seen that "feature".
Your wife sounds like she'd love the BSoD screensaver.
einarabelc5: On my personal experience backing up in optical media as a primary source is both a hassle and a shot in the foot. FOR RESTORE REASONS. Here's why.
1: All the reasons posted so far with the different software suites WinRar, ImageBurner, etc.
2: Optical media is very exposed to environment changes: climate, fungi, your dog, bugs, your kids, etc.
3: Optical media is very prone to errors and dependent on optical drives. If it gets dirty it won't read on some drives. There are different levels of dirty a drive can handle. You have to handle it with care. You have to clean it. And the list goes on.
4: Speed, Optical Media is Slow. Period.
Take it from someone who was backing up on CDs and DVDs for 15 years.
In reality what you have to think about is not only how are you going to backup your data but HOW ARE YOU GOING TO RESTORE IT and HOW SAFE YOUR DATA WILL BE ON THE BACKUP.
It used to be by the time all this software was developed the price per Megabyte on Hard drives didn't justify switching over to HDD back up but today THERE IS SIMPLY NO JUSTIFICATION TO USE DVDs over HDDs as a backup media.
When I downloaded TW2 I had an internal harddrive mounted on a Thermaltake SATA docking station. It took me 5 minutes to backup the entire game. No more than 60 bucks, the price of the game to have that available.
Like this:
Select, Drag, Drop, Wait.
If I need to I create a backup of a backup and I'm good to go.
I've never met a Systems administrator that prefers DVDs over other media( Tapes, HDDs) for backup purposes.
Well, the reason I had this question is because on my 3mbps connection, it took me forever to redownload the Witcher 2 from GoG.com after my hard drive randomly died without any indications. I had an external backup drive, but it only backed up system files and documents... I didn't know the WD Smartware software wouldn't back up EVERYTHING.