CDR vs CD - RW I have a friend who is a Medical Transcriptionist. She does this at home and on line. She has installed a program called "Speed Type". Most Doctors dictate the same combination of words for their particular discipline and they use those combinations over and over. So instead of typing the same thing over and over she codes those words and puts them in the Speed Type program. When she gets a new patient and the doctor dictates the combo she types a code and that particular combination of words goes into the report. Saves a lot of typing. Now you can imagine how many of these combo's she collects. She transcribes for many, many Doctors. These combinations and some are up to ten words or more have to be "Backed Up" Wow after all this here is the question. Would she be better off to use a CD-RW, do the backup and the next backup erase all and do the backup again with all the new combo's OR should she use a CDR and throw it away and use a new one? Sorry to be so long winded. Any help will really be appreciated. Thank you for any help. Harry

Personally I would use a CD-R. She will eventually find out that if she uses a CD-RW it will show up blank at some point. In other words the backup files on the disk will not be able to read. I would buy a stack of CD-R's and use that media. If she uses a multisession burn then she should be able to put backup files on the disk until it is full, then start a new disk.

Does it have to be CD? Why not use USB drive? i_XpUser

XPUser The USB port is fine but we need a device for the USB. Harry

I think XpUser was referring to a USB Thumb drive. You can get them up to 1GB - 2GB for very reasonable prices - the higher capacity ones aren't cost effective right now. You just have to plug it in and copy the file over using Windows Explorer - no need to burn to CD. Michael J

If my memory serves me right, USB flash drives also suffer from a similar degrading that CD-RW suffers from. USB drives, after so many writes (not insignificant number mind), will start degrading and not functioning correctly and you will need to replace the USB flash drive. On the other hand CD-Rs are very cheap these days and can be useful as historical archives for her. Additionally as these are basically text files (unless I am mistaken) then it will be a long time before she fills up 700 MB using multi-session writing. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

My transcriptionist works at her home. She types progress notes into Word files for each patient. She then cooks them to a CD. I copy the newly altered files to my office computer HDD and I also back them up to a thumb drive and an external USB 2.0 HDD. I take the thumb drive and the external HDD (it's a 2.5 inch so it fits in my shirt pocket) home and copy the files to a HDD there. This is probably too much information but I've used all the media above for the purpose that you describe ... except CD/RW which was the original question. CD media is cheap and CD burners are fast and CDs are archiveable.