Instead, consider archiving your
CHAPTER 12: Finding and Organizing Your Pictures 249
images to another device. If you have a CD-RW or DVD-R/RW drive, you can copy dozens or
hundreds of images to a disc (depending on the file size) that will last more or less forever. CDs
do degrade over time, but they will last for a hundred years or so??”longer than the ink on many
kinds of photographs. To be sure your images are protected, you can duplicate your CD or DVD
every few years??”or, more realistically, transfer the images to whatever technology is popular
then, like nuclear bionic laser holographic kneepads. Or whatever.
A CD-RW drive is a kind of CD drive that can write to blank discs, while DVD writers come
in several varieties, the most common of which is DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM. Most of these
drives come with software like Adaptec??™s Easy CD and DVD Creator (www.adaptec.com), seen
in Figure 12-6, or perhaps Nero (www.nero.com). These programs let you simply drag-and-drop
image files from the hard disk to the CD, and then ???burn??? the disk, a process that takes a few
minutes to copy all the data to the CD. After it??™s done, the CD-R is playable in any computer
with a CD-ROM drive.
FIGURE 12-6 CD burning software makes it easy to copy blank images to a CD.
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