What software are you using for the backups? m Or are you just doing a drag and drop with Explorer?

DVD-RW is a poor choice for backups. I know you are hoping to be able to use them over and over again but they are only good for a couple uses then they go bad. If you want to archive things on disc, DVD-R is a better choice. Buy a large bundle of them and they will be rather inexpensive and the odds of them working later are much better.(especially if used in another drive or machine.) Also, some brands tend to work better with some burners than others. so you may want to try first with single or 5 packs to see what works best with yours.

Better yet, save up your bucks and buy a cheap external drive to back up on. It will be far more reliable. If that is out of reach for now, buy a few flash drives. They hold far more than a DVD does, can be used over and over many times and will work when you need them to. A couple 16GB units won't cost much more than a stack of DVD's.

If making System Recovery Discs...NEVER use RW discs. You'll regret it later if you do.

Also , in addition to what Wizard has stated , some disc burning software has an option box that you tick to close the disc so that new files cannot be added to it after the burn is completed. Make sure this option is NOT selected if you are using rewritable disks in the drive.      -- Ace --

I use an external 1TB hard disk and Casper disk clone software. Casper creates a bootable, incremental clone of your hard drive. Every evening I hook up the external hard drive to the SATA-3 USB port on my laptop. Casper automatically starts up and updates the clone. This typically takes only 10 minutes, but will take longer if I have installed a big package or the defragger has decided that my internal drive needs attention.

Cost: US$130 for the 1TB external hard drive, Casper 8.0 US$50

True, you have only one backup version, but it is bootable and I used it to upgrade my 2@750GB (raid0) HDD to 2@1TB (raid1) SSHD. I just updated the external clone, removed the hard drives, installed the hybrid hard drives, changed the BIOS setting from raid0 to raid1, connected the external clone and booted. Then I ran Casper and had the clone copied to the internal drives. Then I booted up on the internal drives.

Always thought RW discs were the way to go if I wanted to add stuff to it. Thanks for tips guys. Really appreciate it.

Right click and move to folder.

One upon a time....sort of last century....yes.

These days...if it's not an external HD it's at least a USB flash drive.

CD RW and DVD RW are old tech not worth considering as they are somewhat 'fragile'...

Well...at least I can use them for storage if nothing else. Problem is when I insert the disc that I put all the installer packages, plus the backup skins on it takes like forever to read it and when it does come up it doesn't show anything I put on it. All it says is that I have 4.26 gigs free of 4.26 gigs on the disc. Why won't it read it? If I can't access the disc I lose all that. Damn!

Writable media like CD and DVD actually have a shelf life and will degrade over time depending on quality, storage, & handling.  I think a good quality CD/DVD is expected to last 7-ish years, so if you have things you want off of old media it might be time to move that data someplace else.

So how would i go about transferring a Windows installation disc to a different media, say a USB stick?

Pack it as .iso,you're are free to go. 

It's not bootable as an ISO is it?

http://www.askvg.com/a-bootable-usb-utility-to-create-bootable-usb-drive-to-install-windows-vista-server-2008-and-7/

Had a go at bootable USB OS installs....

...had no luck....

...turned out to be bad ram....after hours of head scratching....

Rufus does all the work, all you need is a install iso.

http://rufus.akeo.ie/