How to Burn Without Getting Singed

You've got a recordable CD drive in your PC, so why aren't you using it? The recordable CD is the new floppy, but better: It's a ubiquitous, cheap, and reliable way to store data on removable media; plus, it offers almost 500 times more storage than the old 1.44MB floppy.

But many of us haven't yet realized how handy recordable CDs can be. So don't wait any longer--here's a step-by-step guide that explains how to create a backup of valuable documents and how to make a copy of an entire audio CD.

First, a few terms to know:

CD-R disc: A recordable CD that you can "write" or save data to once. A CD-RW disc, on the other hand, can be overwritten many times.

CD-RW drive: A drive in your PC that is capable of writing to CD-R and CD-RW discs, as well as reading data from CD-ROMs, and playing audio CDs. A CD-ROM drive can only read data and play audio CDs.

Burn: The process of writing data to a recordable CD. It's done with a laser, so the process involves "burning" the data onto the disc.

Burn speed: How fast data is written to the disc. You'll see this depicted as "4X," "16X," and so forth.

Coaster: A CD-R that turns out to be unreadable because of a recording error. This can often happen if you use your PC to do other things while burning a CD, or if you have a slow system. The latest generation of CD-RW drives incorporates technology to help prevent burning coasters.

Image: A complete copy of the data as it will appear on the CD, but in a separate file on your hard drive. Creating an image helps prevent burning coasters and saves time when burning multiple copies. But in general, creating an image will add extra steps to the burning process. It may not always be necessary on newer drives.