An archiving question in disguise from an inSync reader:

"I have a rewritable CD recorder and I have successfully backed up my hard drive to a rewritable disc. I need to back the drive up again and I am not sure of the process to reuse the rewritable CD. How do I reuse the rewritable CD-R?"

Actually there are two issues here. In order to erase your CD-RW you will need to run an erase pass on the CD rewritable disc before you can reburn it. In programs like Toast you mount the CD on the desktop, drag and drop the CD into Toast (to launch the program), and then you select the Erase command from the Info screen. The disc will now be ready to reburn.

Issue #2 is that you want to be sure you aren't burning over the same disc for archiving. You need to have several discs in rotation so you can go back several versions if necessary. Corruption in files (much like politicians) can take a while to manifest itself in a noticeable way. Having an archive of corrupted data is rarely useful. That's why it's important to be able to go back a week or two on your data. The TTOTD from 6/17/98 has much more information about archiving.