ARRRGGGGHHHH!!! Burned by Disc Burner

Question

ARRRGGHHHH! I attempted to burn a disk of client files using Apple's disk burner. What a completely frustrating experience. This is as intuitive as a Windows box. Not only that...but...
I pulled a folder from my Client harddrive (external drive). The burner told me there were too many files. So, in the DVD window (where I dragged the folders) I deleted excess folders (my RAW files!). It still told me too much data. Figuring it is still including the folders I deleted, I emptied the trash. ARRRRGGGHHH!
It took the folders from my client external drive and deleted them! ***???? The DVD I was trying to burn is on my desktop of my MacPro. The folders were copied from the external drive and it was my understanding these are only aliases. Also, there was only 3G's of info in the files for a DVD with plenty of room. Why did it keep telling me there's not enough room. What a POS. ;~/
Not that I'll even consider using this POS system to burn disks, but could anyone explain *** just happened???? Luckily, I've delivered the job to the clients, and have the original, unedited RAW files backed up - but I have lost the edit, the adjustments and the naming.
Also, from the time I put blank media in, it takes more than 10 minutes for the system to even recognize the disk.
Very frustrated.

Answer 1

through an alias, it actually takes the folder from my external drive and deletes it
Deleting aliases do not delete the actual files. The files within alias folders are real files, though, and can be deleted. They will not have the alias arrow in their icons.
Hey Apple, that has got to be one of the worst ideas yet! Thanks for assisting me in throwing away hours worth of RAW file editing. An alias should be just that! And if I delete a folder from the DVD I'm preparing to burn it should only remove it from the DVD - NOT my external drives.
There are reasons that it works the way it does. Before Tiger (OSX 10.4) the disc burning system was different:
When you inserted a blank disc it created a hidden disk image file (the size of the bank disc) on you system hard drive. Anything you dragged to the blank disc was copied into that disk image file. You could move, delete, or rename those copies without affecting the original files. When told to burn, it copied the contents of the disk image file onto the blank disc, then deleted the disk image file.
There were two problems with that method:
1) Space
At that time burners were only for single-layer discs, but that still needed 4.7 GB of the system hard drive for the disk image file. If your system drive was getting full you couldn't free up space by burning then deleting files because there wasn't enough room for the disk image file. Now, with double-layer DVDs and Blu-ray, you would need even more space, up to 50 GB.
2) Time
The first DVD burners used by Apple were only 1X or 2X, so the actual burning time was much longer than the time spent copying the files into the disk image file. With newer drives up to 20X, the copying time made the overall burning a lot slower.
The new system avoids these problems, but you do have to be careful to look for the alias indicator to avid accidentally deleting real files. If an entire folder won't fit, don't delete from inside the alias folder. Instead, create a folder inside the Burn Folder, then drag the desired files from the original folder into the new folder inside the Burn Folder. This will create aliases, which can be safely deleted if there is insufficient space.