A comment on ISO Burning.

I’m platform neutral and have used ImgBurn for some time now and love it. Whenever I fix a PC I install it. As mentioned by debbie T Disk Utility does burn from ISO images. But if you really want to rock with the cool kids on a Mac, you’ve got to open up Terminal and do it from the command line.

The command “hdiutil” has more options then you can image but burning with it couldn’t be easier. In this example I burned the disk image Pinnochio.iso to a CD. For simplicity, I moved the image file to my home folder. The user types in the bit after the $, all the rest is progress reported by the system.

G4Mac:~ chuck$ hdiutil burn Pinocchio.iso
Please insert a disc:
Preparing data for burn
Opening session
Opening track
Writing track
………………………………………………………………………….
Closing track
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Closing session
Finishing burn
Verifying burn…
Verifying
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Burn completed successfully
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
hdiutil: burn: completed

Notes:
Verify and eject are default functions so the completed disk just pops out when completed.
The command also works with .dmg files.
To see all of the options of hdiutil go back to terminal and type “man hdiutil”.

A developer named James W. Walker has a collection of free scripts called “Custom Hybrid CD Kit” which helps you create Hybrid (cross platform) disks on a Mac. The output is an ISO image file. The scripts allow you to designate which files are hidden in Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder. Anybody who has tried to create one of these will appreciate this little bundle.

One good feature of Windows 7 is that that you can now burn a iso directly when you right click on one. Yet you still can’t mount an iso file directly. This is crazy since everything on MSDN is an iso file and you have to use a 3rd party utility to mount it. OSX handles everything so much easier.

As for the drobo argument. It depends on how important your data is to you. The drobo is like an insurance policy, yeah you pay extra for safety – but when you need it you are really happy. If a backup drive goes down, then you have no backup until you get a new drive and then backup your data. If anything happens to your main drive during that time, then you are out of luck. If you used a backup drive as a time machine drive and it goes down, you just lost your history.

Does the average person need a drobo, depends on how important their data is for them. For worry free backup, it is pretty much the best solution. Now I don’t have a drobo, though I certainly would like to get one in the future and it is certainly true that the price is a deterrent. Right now I have 4 drives in my Mac Pro where I use 3 for backup. Plus another external drive to backup my Macbook Pro.

The drobo also lets you add storage without have to throw away previous investment. Yeah you can buy a new backup drive when they get cheaper to replace current, but it is better to be able to add instead of replace capacity.

As for the question of how much capacity you need. Well it is a good idea beside using time machine to clone your drive and create an image. I do this weekly and try to keep previous images until the drive is filled and I have to delete old backup images. Plus the drobo has apps now and you can even access content over the web.