Adding items to the burn folder

Next, I double-click the burn folder to open it. As you can see from Figure 2 it looks like a regular OS X Finder folder, with the exception of the dark stripe on the top of the right side, and the Burn button on the right side of that stripe.

Figure 2: The inside of a burn folder looks like a regular folder, plus the additional bar at the top.

Dragging items to a burn folder creates aliases

You can think of the burn folder as being like other Mac folders, but there is one difference. When you drag items to it, you really create aliases pointing to those original items - you're not copying or moving those items.

This is perhaps the most unusual thing about a burn folder, but it's also a very good thing. You really don't want to create a duplicate copy of your data, you just want to burn it to a disk. The creation of aliases here is your way of saying "Here, these are the locations of the items I want to burn to disk."

To populate the burn folder, just open another Finder window, and navigate to the files or folders that you want to copy to a CD or DVD. For the purposes of this tutorial I'm just going to copy two folders to my burn folder, one named "Als Life", and the other named "Reference". After doing this my burn folder is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Folders placed in a burn folder are really aliases.

As you can see, the burn folder shows these two new folders as aliases. You can tell they're aliases from the arrow at the bottom-left of the "Als Life" and "Reference" folders.

One last note about burn folders is they they are nice in that they display the size of the folders I've copied here, in this case 1.03GB. At 1.03GB I'll need to use a DVD-R for my backup.

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