[Reggie Fowler]

What is the point of a burn folder? Are you suppose to drag files into a burn folder and burn them? What would be the benefit of doing that over dragging files directly onto a blank CD in the finder?

[mathus]

From my experience in panther, when burning, dragging the files onto the CD itself would take a considerable amount of time to copy (especially for a DVD), now with Tiger the burn folder creates a shortcut eliminating the 'copy' process and thus speeding up the operation.

Hope that helps!

[Rickster]

Actually, I gather the reasoning behind "Burn Folders" is that you can easily burn them to CD repeatedly. Put some folders that you'd like to back up regularly into a burn folder, and then hit the burn button once a week, or whatever.

The "copy" process shouldn't be necessary -- even in 10.2, the Disc Recording API allows burning a disc from files in their original locations. Why Finder continues to insist on this time- and space-wasting step (forcing me to keep 5 GB free on my startup partition if I ever want to burn a DVD) when using the "normal" CD/DVD-burning UI is beyond me.