I format quite often, probably every 1.5 months. I employ very good backup techniques though, every file i download i put it in a dowloads folder on my deskop, when it comes time to formate i back up this downloads folder, as well as everything in my documents folder. Then i am ready to format. I keep my music collection on an old 4 gig hard drive formatted with fat32 so i can access it from linux so there is no need to backup that.

I have been doing this quite a bit as i have 14 of these backup CD's (all gotten over dial up and all of which are full.

Avatarp: a good format should do it, are you running fat32 or NTFS. If you are running fat32 goto bookdisk.com and get the one of the bootdisks (i use techwordm) and format that way