Optical drives have progressed a long way in the past few years, and you can
now easily purchase DVD writers that are capable of burning 9GB of data to a
disk for an insignificant amount of money. Even if you don’t plan on watching
or copying DVDs on your computer, it is still worth purchasing a burner for
their superior backup capabilities.
When purchasing a DVD writer, you will want one that is capable of burning
both the '+' and '-' standards, and it should also be Dual Layer compatible.
This will ensure that you can burn to almost all recordable DVDs currently on
the market (the other major format, DVD-RAM is almost unused, for the most
part, so don’t worry about it).