I’ve hankered after a DVD burner for some time. Sunday, Jack installed one in my PC that he had ordered for me as a surprise. I burned a CD using it right away, but had to wait to test out the DVD burning until I picked up some DVD-Rs, which I did yesterday.
Since I was already used to using the K3b application to burn CDs, I was pleased to find that the process was exactly the same to burn DVDs: it just took longer. I usually expect to burn a CD in four or five minutes, and the DVD took about fourteen minutes. What surprised me was how much stuff I have in my /home directory. (For non-Linux users, the /home directory is where all the user files go.) I had more than would fit in 4.2 Gigabytes, which is the amount a DVD will hold. After a little trimming, I was able to back up all my music and digital photo files, as well as my spreadsheets and text files. It just astonishes me that I need a DVD to back up my important files when I can remember the days when all of my data would fit on a 20 meg fixed drive. You know, back when we were using carrier pigeons to exchange email.