CD-RW

[ari.torhamo at saunalahti.fi]

> however it dies have restrictions... for example if you delete a file it
> wont get erased from the disk. thus your space on the disk will shrink
> with time and eventually you have to reformatt it.

When I still was using Windows in my home machine, I used to back up my 
data to CD-RWs. I partly used UDF for doing this and was able to write 
to the disks time after time without losing disk capacity (I had InCD 
software installed). Apparently there are different versions of UDF:

>From http://www.mrichter.com/cdr/primer/udf.htm :

"When UDF is applied on an erasable blank, a new option is available. In 
addition to being able to write variable-length packets and to erase the 
whole disc, you can write, read and erase individual fixed-length 
packets. Now the CD-RW begins to resemble a conventional floppy, where 
the packets are the sectors, at least from the point of view of the 
user. That capability is reflected in DCD 2.x. However, one problem of 
erasable blanks is that they support a limited number of erasures - 
nominally, a thousand."

This is something I really would like to see applied in Ubuntu (without 
need to use the command line). It's usefull when you need to temporarily 
back up a relatively large amount of data and don't want to waste CD-R 
disks. And always when you need to do changes to your saved data, UDF 
shows it's strenght.

Regards,

Ari Torhamo