At the end of August 1999, Scientific American published an article entitled ‘What is a DVD and how does it work?’, In which Benjamin Britton, associate professor and electronic artist at the University of Cincinnati, United States, indicated that “the DVD , which stands for versatile digital disk, is about to become the most popular and reliable medium for storing data, especially high-quality digital video. “
It was, indeed, on August 30, 1999, when the Compact Disc continued to stand out as one of the essential media in many houses for the storage of portable data, until the official arrival of the DVD , whose greater space capacity made it become in the excellent option not only to save many more files, but also heavier documents, such as video files.
In fact, the film industry took advantage of this new format to launch digital quality films on the market for home viewing using a DVD player.
Although some other format has arrived since that time (as is the case with Blu-Ray), still many users continue to use it. And as with CDs, there are different DVD formats, among which we can mention the presence, for example, of DVD-R, DVD + R and DVD-RW. And in case you need to delete one, we can only do it with the DVD-RW type. We explain how you can easily format them.
Formatting a DVD-RW in Windows
We will start by inserting the DVD-RW disc into our DVD burner drive . Of course, as is evident, we must make sure that the unit is compatible when recording DVDs, since otherwise it will not be possible to erase, format or write new data to the disc.
Now we must erase the existing data on the disk . To do this, we must go to Start, Computer and open Windows Explorer. Once we click on the DVD icon, the DVD burner software will open. In the toolbar, click on Delete this disk , and follow the instructions.
Once inside the Burn files to disk window, we must give our disk a name, to be able to identify it later. We select the format we want to use , either as a USB flash drive or with a CD / DVD player. Everything will depend on the purpose we want the disc to have.
We continue with the formatting process , which could take a few minutes. Once it is finished, we can start adding the files we want to the disk.
Formatting a DVD-RW on Mac
As in the section dedicated to Windows, in macOS the process is quite similar. We must insert the DVD-RW disc into the disc drive . Most Mac drives have the ability to burn DVDs, but we must also bear in mind that newer versions do not have a drive, so we will have to connect an external optical drive.
We access Disk Utility within the Utilities section, in the Applications folder. We look for our DVD-RW, and click on the Erase tab, which will open the formatting utility necessary to erase the data.
As with CD-RWs, you can select two different options: Quickly, which will be faster, or Completely, which will take a few minutes. In case of disk problems, the best option is to choose the latter.
We click on the Delete button . A few minutes later, once the process is finished, we will have a perfectly clean and empty DVD-RW, ready to write new data.
