[linux] CD burning utilities

[Bradley Bell]

>I'm trying to make a backup of (most of) my home directory on CD, but 
>the problem is that I haven't found a good way to select a lot of 
>directories that I want combined on a CD.  I've been trying to use GUI 
>utilities (Arson is the one I've been trying most persistently), but 
>one problem is that I keep getting insanely huge estimates of how much 
>data is in these directories, much bigger than I think they actually 
>are.  (I was going to try to create an iso anyway, in spite of the size 
>estimate, but I couldn't figure out a way to create an iso without 
>burning a CD.)
>
>It's just occurred to me that I could create a directory, symlink in 
>everything I want to burn, and then tell mkisofs to use that directory, 
>but I wanted to ask if anyone else knows anything that would work 
>better?
>
>Surely I'm not the only one in the world who wants to create an iso 
>image, including some directories and excluding others!

k3b is a nice gui, and will certainly let you do this (quite easily).  Just
drag the stuff you want into the project, or drag everything, and then
remove the stuff you don't want.

It's pretty easy in mkisofs also.  Read the man page, take especial note of
these options:
-x or -m
-exclude-list
-path-list
-graft-points

as for the size estimates, try using the "du" command to see what the size
really is.

-brad