>I've got a Zip, Jaz, several external 1Gig drives, and and CD-R / RW. But 
>can anyone tell me if there's an EASY way to back up a 4.2 Gig Hard disc to 
>CD, either directly or via some other media ?

I have an old 1Gb drive I used; a Jaz cartridge would work the same way. 
I just dragged "stuff" off my 4Gb drive onto the 1Gb until it had about 
600Mb on it (setting the "label" on the 4Gb to "in progress" as I 
copied). It required som playing, because I had to "split up" a couple of 
folders that were > 600Mb all by themselves. But then I fired up Toast & 
cut the CD from the 1Gb. Trashed all of it, and grabbed another 600Mb 
from the 4Gb, repeat. When everything on the 4Gb (top level) was that 
pretty pink, I was done.

With multiple external "devices", either HD or Jaz, the process _should_ 
be even easier. You might be able to get everything "divided up" nicely 
all at once. My next purchase will probably be another drive, that I'll 
partition; at least one "CD sized", maybe two. And I'll try to use that 
drive only for "temporary" stuff and "spare copies" of work in progress, 
on a daily basis. That way I won't have to worry about only doing a CD 
backup every few months.

Another possibility for you would be to use Retrospect to back up to 
multiple JAZ cartridge partitions of 640Mb, then use Toast to cut a CD 
from each cart. Not having enough "anythings" to hold a full Retrospect 
backup, that wasn't an option for me. I'm also not sure how well a 
Retrospect "archive file" would do at being recovered off a CD, or how 
well Toast would do with a single file that large. I think I like the 
ability to mount the CD just as if it were a small hard drive with 1/4 of 
my big drive on it!

It'd be great if Retrospect or something would work "transparently" to 
CD-R... May have to write a "compare" program that'll scan a hard drive, 
then scan all the CD backups I have, and "flag" or "list" anything on the 
hard drive that _isn't_ on the CDs - and ideally copy those items to a 
spot "to be backed up". Anybody looking for a shareware project? Should 
be doable in FB _fairly_ easily... :-)

Bill