CD-RWs or DVD+/-RWs are a good backup medium, they have a reasonable life span and can be rewritten. If you want to use a DVD burner for your backups, you should refrain from using DVD+ or DVD- disks and choose DVD-RAMs! DVD-RAM technology is the only DVD technology that has been conceived for use in professional IT environments right from the start. The first choice for backups, of course!

 There are generally several possibilities to burn backups with Z-DBackup:

Direct Backup to CD-RW or DVD+/-RW
 Usually, a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray must be recorded completely in one go. To remove this problem, UDF  ("Universal Disk Format") was invented. Here, blocks of 2 or 8 KB are written to the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, which allows to adress a CD-RW or DVD+/-RW just like a hard drive. The UDF burning software (PacketCD, DirectCD, InCD, InstantBurn) runs silently and unnoticed in the background.

 In connection with a UDF burner software (PacketCD, DirectCD, InCD, InstantBurn), a direct backup to CD-RW or DVD+/-RW is also possible with Z-DBackup. Z-DBackup automatically recognizes mediums that have been UDF-formatted with PacketCD, DirectCD, InCD or InstantBurn. If that doesn't work on your system, you can select the option Disable CD-ROM check  (in the program setup) to disable Z-DBackup's write lock for CD/DVD/Blu-Ray.

 The UDF burner programs are not part of Z-DBackup and must be obtained separately!!

 Direct backup to DVD-RAM
 The advantage of the DVD-RAM over other recordable and rewritable CD blanks is that it was invented especially as an archiving medium. If the medium is handled with care, the data on a DVD-RAM has a durability of at least 30 years. Additionally it can be used almost like a hard drive or floppy disk and no burning software is needed to write to it. The DVD-RAM can be re-recorded up to 100,000 times.

 OEM DVD-RAM drives are often missing a suitable DVD-RAM driver, but there are DVD-RAM drivers freely available on the internet.

 Indirect backup with the add-on module Z-DataBurn

 Z-DataBurn makes it possible to automatically burn archives created with Z-DBackup to CD-RW, DVD+/-RW, Blue-Ray or M-Disk right after the backup is complete, i.e. the backup archive is first created on a local or remote hard drive and then then burned to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray. You can choose to have the backup archive created by Z-DBackup automatically deleted after the burning process.

  If the backup is first created on a removable drive, the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray lock is disabled!

 Multi-Spanning on CD, DVD or Blue-Ray
 If the backup archive is too large for a normal CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, the following option can be enabled in the backup settings:

Each partial archive file is burned to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray by Z-DataBurn after it was created on the hard drive.

To open a multi-volume backup archive later, you have to open the file with the extension .ZDB or .ZIP which will usually be found on the last medium of the multi-volume backup.

  Backups spanning multiple volumes on CD/DVD/Blu-Ray or tape can only be created with the professional version of Z-DBackup!

 

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