What I have learned about the optical drive and my question is:

Question

I am used to burning data to a CD or DVD on the PC and never experienced a problem. With an RW disk, I can simply open the disk and add, delete, format, etc. without any problem. It is fairly easy to make the disk as a Data disk which effectively works identical to any external hard drive storage device in terms of file operation. I would like to do the same thing on my iMac 27, but have learned some of the limitations of my Apple drive program.
1) It will recognize only certain disks. Example: will not recognize a CD-RW, resulting in the following error message: “Medium Write Error” . However, the drive will recognize a CD-R blank disk.
2) When it does work, the disk cannot be made into a Data disk in that it is limited to what it will allow. Example: I cannot delete selected portions of anything stored on it. I cannot format the disk; it can only be erased. If I want to add a file to it, I must go through the entire Burn process of creating a *.dmg file. If I want to modify a file or folder, I have to erase the entire disk, make the file correction and burn it again onto the disk.
3) The erasable disk can only be made if the disk has been checked as “Leave disc appendable”, otherwise it is strictly a read-only disk. The following link should be helpful.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/10.5/en/duh1749.html
4) Apple’s position is apparently that anything burned to a disk should be for archive purposes only.
5) The installation of a 3rd party program such as Roxio is the only way to achieve the ability to have a disk perform as an external hard drive.
My question is this: Can anyone suggest a reasonably prices 3rd party data disk creation program that functions well within the Snow Leopard environment?

Answer 1

My suggestion would be Roxio Toast and, if you are not already doing so, instead of using only media for your backups, you should consider one or more external hard drives for either Time Machine and/or a bootable clone. Both methods automatically update your files while copying them. I have bootable clones and, once or twice a year, I will burn a DVD with extremely important data just to have another copy, but that is not my main backup.