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Sometimes the mac is not as intuitive as it should be, and copying cds and dvds that are not protected is one of these tasks that is not easy to figure out. If you don´t want to spend the money on program, you can use disk utility to burn a copy of your disks.

1. Put the disk in you want to copy, go to applications then utilities. Open Disk Utility.

2. Choose your cd from the left by clicking on it to select it.

 3. From the menus at the top of the screen, click file, and new, and then disk image from "your disk", the name of the disk you want to copy should appear after disk image from ...

 4. a new window will open asking you where to save your new disk image and to give it a name. ** very important ** at the bottom of this window there is a drop down menu asking for the image format, choose read only, this will speed up the process of writing the image. Then click the save button.

Disk utility will then begin to create the disk image which you will use to burn to a new blank CD. When it is finished you can eject the disk and insert a new blank disk to copy the image to.

1. To copy the image to the new blank cd you will need to go again to the file menu, and choose open disk image. Find the disk image you created and open it. It will then appear in the left hand column under your hard drive in the disk utility window.

2. Click on the image in the left hand column so it is selected, and then click the burn symbol in the disk utility window. It is the far left icon at the top of the disk utility window. This will open a new window, click the burn button at the bottom and disk utility will start burning the new image to the cd or dvd.

YOUR DONE. 

MD5 utilities are available for Windows and Linux and Mac. Most Linux installations provide an md5sum command for calculating MD5 message digests.

An MD5 utility for Windows can be downloaded at www.fourmilab.ch/md5/.

Instructions on checking an MD5 checksum on a Mac:

1. In Finder, browse to /Applications/Utilities.
2. Double-click on the Terminal icon. A Terminal window will appear.
3. In the Terminal window, type: "md5 " (md5 followed by a space).
4. Drag the downloaded file from the Finder into the Terminal window.
5. Click in the Terminal window, press the Return key, and compare the checksum displayed to the screen to the one on VMware's download page.

1. Insert a blank disc.
2. Start Disk Utility.
3. From the File menu, choose Open Disk Image and select the ISO to be burned.
4. In the list of volumes, you will now see an item representing the ISO file. Select it.
5. Click the Burn button and follow the instructions.

Everybody these days knows that backups are necessary, anything can happen, hard drive crash, stolen laptop, etc... you need to back up your files. We did a little search around and came up with these backup solutions:

Silver keeper is a great free backup program that we are currently using.

Another free tool is cccloner, which makes a complete copy of your Mac. You can find instructions on how to make a bootable backup with cc cloner here: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html.

According to some articles on the net, SuperDuper is the best tool out there for backing up your Mac, and for $28 it is worth it.

 There is a more indepth article at Lifehacker with more software solutions to backup your Mac.