DVD Burner, RW Media, & Formatting

I've had a DVD Burner in my current desk top for around two years, but have yet to read or write a DVD in it. I'd like to start making partition image backups on it using RW media (assuming it still works). When I used to do this on my CD Rom RW drive, the RW CD's had to be formatted for data first before use. Is there a similar requirement for RW DVD's? I suspect no, but it's just unclear to me.

 

Acronis images are created on CD-RW or DVD-RW. There is no "formatting" required and I am really at a loss as to what that would mean. How was the formatting done?

 

You format the disk only if your planning to packet write to the disk. Holds true for DVD-RWs and CD-RWs. I believe most people here are against packet-writing a disk since the file table is not written to the disk until the disk is ejected or closed. Therefore if something goes wrong and the burning shuts down in the middle of a burn all the data is pretty much gone, also packet writing requires a udf driver (built into XP) so the disk may not work on different PC's unless they have a udf driver installed. The burning software you use to packet write normally installs a driver for reading the disk when you install the software.

 

I know that I avoid packet format like the plague. I like a CD or DVD that I can poke in any drive with any O/S and read it. Since it's easy to get one in that format, and the backup is faster than packet writing, it's a no-brainer for me.

 

Thanks to everyone who replied. I'll have to investigate packet writing since I haven't previoulsy run across the term. Given that's the case, I likely don't want nor need to do that. Formatting the RW CD's was done with Roxio's EasyCD creator initialize data CD Function and was required to be done by DriveImage 4.0 before it considered the CD writable. More than that I don't know.