whats the best brand in your opinions

i wouldn't back up to an optical media. I've seen WAAYYYY too many go bad over time. Ink's fade ( this is what a Recordable Disc uses to store the ones and zeros, ie. dark and light spots burned by the laser ).

Buy External HDD's and even if the motors fail on the drives, you can have the platters put on new motors or have magnetic readers go over the discs and recover the data ( it's expensive to do it, but it's still there as opposed to inks that fade on an optical disc and then are gone FOREVER ).

Dave

I back up to both external HD and dual DVD.
Search for media code "MKM003" and you will find some of the best dual layer DVDs.

I use these
http://www.verbatim.com/products/detail.cfm?product_id=103F2FDE-65B0-5A0F-84F8CBAF0E0FBAC0&cat_id=0F2117D0-65B0-5A0F-8FB35571D951F627

Product code is 95123
They're 2.4x (Verbatim says that's actually up to 6x).

While I see MKM003 when searching the web, it's not a product code Verbatim uses (on the US site at least).

I've read 8x discs (which burn up to 10x) aren't quite as reliable.

Here´s some info:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

I use the same disk as Craig and seem to have good luck burning up to 8 GB.