I noticed that your system identified your drive as "removable CD-ROM". Surely that isn't right. Have you ever burned any Cd or DVD on it? What does K3B report?
Drakbackup and Grsync both see the DVD-RW as a "CD-ROM" which is incorrect. I assure you it an RW device which is seen by the system as such.
Yes, K3b writes CDs and DVDs normally.
Drakbackup and Grsync are applications that write to file systems, as stated before, and are not burner applications. They will only write to hard drives, USB pendrives, tape drives, or formatted RW media, (think DVD-RAM) when it's mounted as a writable file system. K3b is a burner application, which is an entirely different thing.
I was beginning to suspect that, but are you sure?
Drakbackup offers to back up to: "(.) On CD-R " at the third screen of the Wizard. Then at [Configure] I'm offered the use of CD-R/DVD-R to backup to. Then choosing my CD/DVD device I'm offered /dev/hdb, which is a Pioneer DV-116D, a read-write device.
After that I'm offered all sorts of options for all sorts of writing methods: -RW, -R. and -RAM, even with multisession. (My drive doesn't support DVD-RAM).
So I was confused that, having chosen what was offered, it refused to write to what I had chosen, after having given me the impression that it was a backup application with the ability to burn different media.