archive in DVD+R AND DVD-R?

[kisrum]

So I've edited and burned five copies of my inlaws camping trip (Zzzzzz....) on to (Sony) DVD+R and sent them all out and am keeping one archived in a safe place. They play fine on my Panasonic player and on a PS2.

I would like to clear all the files off my hard drive but I'm afraid one of them will come back and say they couldn't play it and then I'll need to go to DVD-R, although all their players are younger than mine and I would think they fall into that 86%.

So should I:
burn a couple on DVD-R just on general principle? I don't currently own any media for this.
hope for the best and if something goes wrong copy the archive back on to my computer and then burn again? I'm under the impression I would lose some video quality since it would be re-rendering. Is that correct?

I know there are bigger problems in the world but this is my first opportunity to make a bad decision in this new hobby. Well, except for the Studio 8

Thanks.

[Bodene]

1) If you have one burnt copy put up as a backup, there is no need to have a copy stored on your HD. I use DVD+R format, and my backups have worked perfectly in every standalone machine I've tried. (6 different brands) A lot of people will say that -R is the way to go since it's more compatible, but I haven't encountered ANY problems while using +R.

2) If, by some chance, someone does tell you that the format wouldn't play on their machine, just do a disc to disc copy from your backup to a new disc, using a different format. Most DVD enabled burning software will do both ISO image (single drive) copies, or if you have 2 drives, you can copy on the fly. You can copy a DVD+R to a DVD-R (and vice versa) without any problem. Remember, with +R and -R the data is the same, just the way in which the writer burns it is different.

3) When copying a DVD or CD on a computer, there is no degradation of quality. The copy is an exact digital duplicate of the original. It's not like copying a cassette, where each additional analog copy sounds worse and worse.