I seem to have made an ultimate newbie mistake. A year ago I purchased DVD-R media for my DVD+R drive. The interesting thing is it seemes to have worked. I have been backing up critical data onto DVD-Rs using my + drive for the whole year, and now a year later, I have discovered my mistake.

My question is, how screwed am I? It seems that I can still read the data off of the oldest of the disks. Should I back up my backups onto DVD+R media? Can I just let it ride?

Thanks for your help.
Barak
cdfreak@barakyedidia.com

Welcome to the forum

I think that your drive is able to write both plus and minus media. For what I know that's impossible that a +R drive can write on -R discs.

What burner do you have?

believe me you got your mistake wrong , the data went unreadable not because you used -r discs , but because you used cheap bad quality discs

Check them in another PC...if they work then why go to the expense of buying and burning new disks? Welcome to the forum If you do a search on +/- compatibility using the forum search-engine you will turn up as much info as you need on the topic. However, like I wrote above, if you can read the disks okay in another PC don't go to any further expense...
P.S. I think Geno is right...your drive may indeed be a dual format unit and you don't realise it. It's quite rare these days to come across a single format unit, if at all.

Thanks for the warm welcome.

Im not sure what drive I have. My driver is
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4163B

This drive can write both plus and minus media, so you're safe

As suggested by easterbunny, however, be sure to use quality media or your disc can become unreadable after a short time

That's a relief. I use the TDK disks they sell by the tower at Costco. Are those any good? What is a good label for media?

hmm TDK sells media with a wide range of mediacodes. If you are lucky you can get some Taiyo Yuden discs branded TDK, but most of times you get low quality discs.

Currently the best media available are Verbatim (NOT the "pearl white" series) and Taiyo Yuden. Verbatim are rather easy to find in stored, but most of times TY discs can be found only in online stores