I wound up not buying a DVD writer at all. Micro Center had a Buslink 48x12x48 (which when I opened it up turned out to be a 48x24x48) for $20, and both Micro Center and Best Buy had really good deals on CD-R's. I'm nervous enough about the mess of formats that I don't feel like spending $300 on something that might be completely worthless in 6 months. CD-R's have been around a while and are completely standard. At that price, I'll put up with the inconvenience. If I use gzip rather than bzip2 compression, I think things will be fast enough so that backups won't be that much of an annoyance. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton