Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks
| There are several ways to burn CDs in Mac OS X. Which method of CD-burning you should use depends largely on what kind of data you are burning to the CD. Let's consider an example in which we'll use a CD-R to backup ~/Library/Mail , which is where your mailboxes are stored if you use the Mac OS X Mail application. The same procedure can be applied to other data. We'll discuss how to accomplish this task with the GUI-based Disk Utility application located in /Applications/Utilities and by using the command line in Terminal. In either case, you should make a disk image before burning your data to a CD-R. To make a disk image of ~/Library/Mail using Disk Utility, first make sure that no existing disk is selected, then select ~/Library/Mail in Disk Utility's Images Figure 6-1. Creating a disk image with the Disk Utility When the disk image has been created, it will appear in the left segment of the Disk Utility window. To burn this image to a CD-R, select the disk image in the Disk Utility window and click on the Burn icon in the toolbar. You will be prompted to insert a disc and to select some options for burning the CD, as shown in Figure 6-2. Figure 6-2. Burning a disk image with the Disk Utility The same task can be accomplished from Terminal using the commands, hdiutil and ditto . For example: hdiutil create -fs HFS+ -volname BackupMail -size 200m ~/Desktop/backupMail.dmg This creates a blank HFS+ disk image of size 200 MB named backupMail.dmg on your Desktop. Next, enter: ditto -rsrc ~/Library/Mail /Volumes/BackupMail This copies your Mail folder (along with all its mailboxes), which is located in ~/Library/Mail , to the disk image. Use the command ditto with the - rsrc option to copy resource forks and metadata. Once this command has completed, enter the following command to unmount the disk image: hdiutil unmount /Volumes/BackupMail Finally, use the following command to burn the disk image to CD: hdiutil burn ~/Desktop/backupMail.dmg |