Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Burning CDs and DVDs

If your Mac can burn CDs or DVDs, you've got yourself the world's most convenient backup system. It's just like having a floppy disk drive—except that a blank CD holds at least 450 times as many files, and a blank DVD holds about 3,250 times as many!

You can buy blank CDs very inexpensively in bulk—$20 for 100 discs, for example—via the Web. (To find the best prices, visit www.shopper.com or www.buy.com and search for blank CD-R.) Blank DVDs are more expensive—about $30 for 50 (at www.cdrdv-drmedia.com, for example)—but that's not ridiculous, considering their capacity.

UP TO SPEED: Mac OS Extended Formatting

Whether you use Disk Utility to erase a disk (or when you first install Mac OS X and elect to erase the hard drive in the process), you'll be confronted with a choice between formatting options called Mac OS Extended and UNIX File System (UFS). (Depending on the kind of disk, you may also see an option to create a DOS-formatted disk for use in Windows machines.)

Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) refers to the HFS Plus filing system, a disk format that has been proudly maximizing disk space for Mac fans since Mac OS 8.1. (For a definition of journaling, see Section A.4.)

Mac OS X still accepts disks that were prepared using the older, Mac OS Standard formatting—the ancient HFS (hierarchical filing system) format—but you can't use one as your startup disk, and any file names longer than 31 characters will appear chopped-off.

As for the UNIX File System ...