If you want to back up and burn your files, you can do this within Windows XP or Vista, although you'd be surprised that people go out and purchase an expensive media suite in order to create their own audio CDs or burn and backup their data files. There are alternatives and many of them are free. Most audio managers such as iTunes will enable you to create and burn your own audio CDs, although these are no good if you want to backup your files to a data disc.

BurnAware Free 0.1.1 is still in beta, but it's a simple tool that will enable you to take your files and quickly burn them to a disc, whether it's a simple 700MB CD or anything as large as a Blu-ray disc. That's assuming that you have a Blu-ray burner to create the discs. BurnAware Free won't enable you to create audio CDs though.

20 Nov 2007