First, thanks for the office-max tip, although the rebate was only for about a week and is over; but there may be more down the road. To anybody trying to register at office max, I wasn't able to do this after my cart was full from the loggin/register link there; I just kep getting dumped back to the register/login screen. But starting from the home directory without shopping first, I was able to register. So if you try it and have problems, be persistent; it can be done. Last night, following the directions in the cdwriting howto and using mkisofs and cdrecord, I did my first data cd. For practice, I just did my /home/chomiak directory without any compression or anything, and it worked. If any of you do your entire backup system by cd, I would like to know what you use, how much compressing you do first, etc. Of course, I am also looking at the backup howto, but would appreciate any tips from personal experience. The only thing is that since you can't rewrite just part of a cdrom, it would seem to me that you would do one more-or-less permanent backup that you might redo from time to time, and then do periodic backups of the things that change frequently. I would really like to avoid having to do a from-scratch re-install in the future, losing data and present setup. But I also want to be able to recover specific files in case of a partial or minor disaster. tIA.
