Should I buy a DVD burner or an external hard drive?

external hard drive

External hard drive won't help you in class

Hey, the best dvd burner is Nero http://www.nero.com but you can find some free ones at http://www.softpedia.com and http://www.downloads.com . Then you can use 5 dvds and backup your computer.

Well if you have the external drive you can create an XCOPY script to automatically backup your files on a schedule you set. It is a easy one line script - just lookup XCOPY. Buy both on ebay for cheap! rather than paying retail price for only one of the two!

hello new 400gb external hard drive not junk from ebay

For 17 gigs I would suggest a cheap External HDD, because with DVDs you have to split the files, they only hold 4.7 gigs, and if you lose one you're screwed. But the DVD burner is going to be cheaper. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1538966&CatId=0 - Cheap External Hard Drivers http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?Recs=10&Nav=%7Cc:89%7C&Sort=4 - Cheap DVD Burners

If I could afford it, I would definitely go for an external HDD (80 GB) An external HDD is a lot more convenient - a lot faster and very flexible. DVD Burners are pretty much slow, you need to regularly buy DVDs. Moreover, many times, DVDs dont burn well and get wasted and I have had issues in which burnt DVDs get spoilt after a couple of years and dont read well or at all. For your video project, you could create an entire DVD image (ISO Image) and probably burn it from a friend's place ...

Go for the external hard drive if you are more concerned about backing up. You can put the video project on the external drive and play it from there.

You've answered your own question. Dual Layer DVD discs only hold 8.5gb of data and single layer 4.7gb therefore you would be able to backup quite easily 17gb. Only if you were to start increasing the amount of data to be backed up would you start to get annoyed about the amount of disks needed and th constant changing over of them. If you are not going to increase from 17gb then dvd is fine. If you do plan on increasing then it may not be your most efficient option. Also dvd burners are actually very cheap at the minute so buy a lower capacity hard drive and with the money saved get a dvd burner as well. If buying dvd discs make sure you purchase rewritable or you will end up spending a lot of money on wasted discs as everytime you backup you will end up with useless old disks (if not following an incremental backup strategy).