No doubt, CD and DVD make a great medium to store your data and backups on, of course there are a few obvious drawbacks to the physical media itself: you can lose them, scratch them, leave them in the wrong place, etc. This same problem also applies to any “stamped” (store bought) CDs/DVDs, so instead of worrying about this, create an electronic backup you can store on your hard drive.

I’ve starting doing this process will all my important CDs that I want to make sure I don’t lose (i.e. Window Vista/2003/XP/2000 install CD, Office 2007/2003/XP/2000, etc.):

1. Create an ISO of the CD to backup. I use ISO Recorder, but  ImgBurn would work as well.
2. If there is a serial number, I create a text file called “serial.txt” and enter the number.
3. Perform a maximum compression on the ISO and serial file. This usually saves ~100 MB per CD (depending of course)
4. Move the data to a hard drive on a RAID array.

This also is great for distributing installation CDs to users because they can simply download the  compressed file and mount the ISO as a drive on their computer and install the program just like they have the CD.

Keep in mind, when you store backups on your hard drive, in the event your drive crashes, you would lose the data (pick your poison I guess), but hopefully you would not damage or lose your CD the same day your hard drive crashed.