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How do I back up to a CD Drive?

Overview
WINDOWS XP USERS CLICK HERE FIRST The Guest Tracker Backup Program allows you to backup to a Floppy Drive or to a Path. A Path can be your computer's hard drive, another hard drive on your computer, another drive on a local area network, a Zip drive, or a CD-RW drive. (A CD-RW drive is a special type of CD drive that can write to blank CDs. Regular CD-ROM drives can not write information to a CD of any type.) To back up to a CD-RW drive, your computer must have some form of direct access software that allows you to write directly to a CD in the same way you would to a floppy or a Zip disk.
Determining Which Drives Are Available
1.)	To find out what drives you have available to you, double click on the My Computer icon on your desktop.
2.)	Within the My Computer window, you can view all of the drives available to you. In the following graphic, you can see that you have a Floppy Drive which is the A: drive, 2 hard drives which are the C: and D: drives, a CD-ROM drive which is the E: drive and a Zip Disk Drive which is the F: drive. Using the Guest Tracker Backup Program, you can backup to any of these drives as long as the CD-ROM drive is a CD-RW model.
Determining If Your CD Drive Can Be Used
1.)	Locate your CD-RW drive as shown above. Be sure that you have a CD-RW disk in the drive and then double-click on it.
2.)	When the CD contents window opens up, click FILE, NEW, and then FOLDER to create a new folder on your CD.
3.)	If a new folder is created, name it TRACKER. It can be the backup folder on this CD. If you get an error message then your CD is not ready to be written to. You may need to install direct access software or you may need to format your CD or you may not be using a rewritable CD or you may not have a CD-ROM drive capable of writing to CDs.
Step by Step
1.)	Exit out of Guest Tracker and start the Backup Program. If you are not prompted to start Backup when exiting Guest Tracker, click the START button, go to PROGRAMS, find the GUEST TRACKER folder, and then click on BACKUP to start.
2.)	Click on the Backup command button to begin the backup process.
3.)	The Backup Database file dialog will appear which allows you to backup a different database if necessary. Click OK to backup your current Guest Tracker database, or select a different database to backup and click OK.
4.)	The Backup window will then appear (as in the following graphic). In the To area, click on the Path option. When you do this a text box labeled "To:" will appear at the bottom of the window. You can type into this field the path (in the form of drive:\directory) that you'd like to backup to. In our case we are going to backup to our F: drive. You'll notice the path we typed in was actually "F:\Monday". This will create a folder called Monday on the disk. CAUTION: We DO NOT recommend having all of your Guest Tracker backups on one disk. If something happens to that disk, you could be without a backup! A better suggestion is to use one disk for each day of the week. (For more information about why this is a good idea, please see What can I do to make sure that my data is protected?)
5.)	If you specify a folder that does not exist, you will be asked if you'd like to have it created for you. Click Yes to have the folder created for you automatically. If you use a different disk for each day of the week (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!), you can use the folder name "TRACKER" (i.e.: F:\Tracker) every day. That way you will not need to change folder names every day. Warning! Guest Tracker's Backup program doesn't understand folder names that are more than 8 characters in length! That means, for instance, that using the folder name WEDNESDAY will prevent your backup from completing properly.
6.)	At the end of the backup process you will get a message that explains what was and was not backed up. Click OK to finish the backup process.