Well, I finally caved in. DVD burners and blanks are now cheap enough that burning CD-Rs seemed like a waste of time, so I went ahead and picked up an inexpensive Toshiba model while at Fry’s yesterday. A quick bit of surgery and it was neatly installed in my server box, and I then set out to back up my entire website onto a DVD. Strangely enough, I’ve now got about 2.2gb of data stuffed away in my /usr/local/www directory, so saving it on CDs was becoming painful and required some thought. Most of the storage is actually in the form of a couple of thousand digital pictures that I’ve taken in the past year or so: now that I have them backed up, I can work on beginning to clean them and retaining only the ones that I think are useful.

I got this thing mostly as a backup device, but will probably also work on using it to develop a couple of short video DVDs. I’ve used tools like mjpegtools and vcdimager to generate VCD images before, apparently now the application of choice is dvdauthor, which can be used to stitch together dvd images and growisofs: a front end to mkisofs which is smart enough to also burn DVDs. I’ll have to give it a try, as soon as I can think of something fun to do with it.