Thom Paine wrote:
I have a DVD-RAM disc that I'd like to do some backups to. Would I just format this disc with ext3 and make a filesystem on it, or would I treat it like a DVD-RW disc?
I recommend that you create an ext2 filesystem on it. The journalling features of ext3 are not necessary on DVD-RAM discs. When mounting it, use the 'noatime' mount option, to avoid atime updates on the files on the disc each time you read them. The atime updates are writes, and they will reduce the number of times you can write to the disc. I do my backups (using rsync) like this to a DVD-RAM disc, and it works very well.
