How many times can I expect to be able to re-format and reuse a CD-RW? We use them as backups (like one for each day of the week) and I was just curious.

Not sure but we recommend our dealers backing up to a USB flash drive instead of CD. For a number of reasons.

Yeah. I've considered that as well.

I think if you have a limited number of days to back up (i.e. you recycle weekly or monthly), definitely a flash drive is the way to go, just due to the longevity. The problem with CD-R/CD-RW is that they allegedly have a 5 year shelf life or XXX number of rewrites, but you never know when one goes bad until it does, and then, assuming you could potentially need that info, you are screwed. The price is obviously restrictive (~50 for a 1G flash drive, about $0.20 for a 800 MB CD-RW)

You might as well buy CD-R's in bulk and shred them when you are done, that way you dont have to worry about longevity of reusable media.

At $0.20 a day (assuming just one disc), you end up paying ~$60-70/year, about the cost of one flash drive.

Just my opinion.

Right now, I just use 5 CD-RW:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday/Saturday
Thursday
Friday

and then reformat them every week. Its not a huge deal for the day to day because we also print a hard copy of the day's transactions so to redo a day wouldnt be a big deal.

My concern is a total crash necessating a complete restore of the customer database in which case I should probably backup to a flash drive maybe once a week or so, no?

hundreds of times or more, depending on the discs.

Since you do a backup a day the most you could lose is one days worth of data.

The real question is how much is that data worth?
With the price of media today I would probably recommend burning two copies a day and then you have a redundency. If one takes a dump on you then you have a backup to your backup.

But then again, since you are doing incremental backups daily, one days worth of data may NOT kill you but it will hurt if it does fail.

And as for disks, I used to tell my clients that you get what you pay for.I have been using Verbatim disks now for over a year and have not had any problems with them. They're a little more expensive but I don't need to worry about them either.

For disposible disks use the cheapest, it won't matter if they get trashed.

IMO