i've had a dvd-r drive for 4+ years now but have never burned a dvd in my life. given my geek tendencies, i'm sure many will be surprised by that. i'm also one of the worst people when it comes to backing up my data. i've had lessons taught to me, such as failed drives and my own stupidity in transferring files to new computers, but yet i did not learn fully from them. this year i have been making cd backups of music and photos, but not on a consistent basis. after the media, then i was going to backup the rest. at this rate though it'll never be accomplished. after burning about 100 cds of my music as backup, i realized that this is fucking ridiculous. in the age of dvds, what the hell am i doing backing up on cd?!!?!?!?!?! so today i have burned my first backup dvd of music. after doing 4 of those, almost all of my music is safely backed up. just one copy is not enough so later i will have to make another copy and possibly on another medium such as a backup hard drive. however, there are those 100 or so backup cds. maybe once i've backed up everything, i'll load the cds and condense them to dvds. seems like such a landfill waste though. i've got to come up with some art project for discarded cds. i've seen a few ideas online but nothing really struck me. well, on to backing up the photos. i've burned one photo backup and it felt like it took a lot longer than the music, but since there wasn't a timed countdown in iphoto like there was in itunes, i'm not really sure.