By Suzann Dodd, ContributorTHE OTHER day, amid discussions of this, that and the other, I was asked if, when one burns a CD, it can be burnt again. I weren't sure of the exact question, so I asked for more data.
Apparently, the user had burnt about 200 megabytes of data and when he went to add another file from a different computer everything he'd saved previously was 'gone'.
I told him he'd probably let his computer pick the default option.
"What option?" he asked.
There are two kinds of CDs that can be burnt (by burning I mean putting data on them) a CD-R and a CD-RW.
You can pretty much consider a CD-R capable of holding the 700MB (megabytes) advertised. Once you've filled it up you can't really erase it and start over; you'd need an RW for that. CD-RWs can be burnt and erased as you like.
But you can go on burning data into a CD-R until you reach that 700 megabyte limit.
The point is, the options you choose. As you use XP and the prebloated applications it has selected for you, when you are about to eject that CD you will be asked how you want to save the stuff.
SAVING THE DATA
Too many people ignore the pop-up and push okay without reading. You can chose to save the data you have burnt onto the CD so that it can be read on any CD player, from your office computer to (if it's music) your car player. Or, you can make it so that it can only be read on the computer you entered the data.
Let's say you're dealing with a sensitive document as well as non-sensitive stuff. You can save the sensitive document in such a way that when you carry that CD to your office and pop it into the drive that document won't even appear in a directory, though the other stuff will.
You can save data in such a manner that the CD can't be written to again, despite how many megabytes are unused.
For example, I got this CD at an expo. Only five megs are used but the creator wanted to make sure that no one could write to it (mean).
When you save data to a CD pay attention, use the help, think about what you're doing. Seven hundred megabytes is a whole heap of space. Don't finalise it when you've only used half or less.
When you're using a CD for transportable storage make sure you save correctly.
Suzann Dodd is a writer and an attorney-at-law.
