Backup Mac to CD or DVD

I know all about, and I do, backup to a timemachine volume externally. I am looking for an easy way to make a second backup of my mac (or at least my files) onto a different media (something besides a hard drive). I decided a CD/DVD would be a good alternative. Asside from manually sorting and burning each CD can anyone recommend a decent way to acomplish this?
Thanks,
-Michael

Personally I gave up on optical media for backup years ago when my data exceed 100 GB.
Besides the nuisances of cataloging all of them, there is the additional problem that home recorded optical media only have a limited life expentance. This adds the additional problem of having to test past media for valid data.It was just more trouble then I thought it was worth.
I just got another external disk and throw away all of the optical media.
Allan

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You did not do a reinstall but rather an Erase and Install. If you don't have a backup, which you should have already had, then you need to see the following:
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The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

Compressing Time Machine backup folder and burning to DVD

Can I compress the backup folder and burn to a DVD disc?
Most people seem to assume that an external hard drive won't fail and so keeping all files backed up to it is a good thing. Surprise - external HDDs fail also.
I'd really like to have compressed back ups on a DVD in order to have 3 locations with my files.

It would have to be a pretty small backup to fit on a DVD. You won't likely find too much benefit from compressing the data because much of it is in binary form that is most likely not going to reduce much if at all.
A single DL DVD can hold 8 GBs. If you have just OS X installed that will require 16 GBs less whatever you may save compressing the data. Personally, I would not risk compressing the data since that could prove just as problematic or more so than keeping it on a hard drive. Furthermore, if you want more than 5 years storage life out of the DVDs, then you have to avoid the stuff they sell at places like Office Depot which have a relatively short shelf life.
If you need to use more than one DVD, then you need a backup utility designed to span a backup across multiple media. Your choices are somewhat limited: Retrospect, Apple's Backup (requires a .Mac account to download and use,) and possible Tri-Backup (but I am not sure about it.)
Or you can buy several hard drives of suitable size, make multiple backup copies to each drive, store one in a vault off-site. Rotate your weekly and monthly backups to the other drives and once every quarter rotate the off-site drive. The chance of all the drives failing at once is pretty small.

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Backup Mac to CD or DVD

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