Burning File and Folder Aliases to CD

When you create a Burn Folder in OS X Tiger or higher, which is done by either choosing New Burn Folder from the File menu or from the Action menu (that’s the button with a gear icon on it in Finder windows), if you look inside that folder, you won’t see your original files. Instead, you’ll see aliases to the originals! You can tell they’re aliases because they have that little curved arrow on them. But don’t let that throw you! When you do click the burn button (in the upper right-hand corner of the Burn Folder’s window), OS X actually goes and gets the original files and burns those to disk, so you don’t have to worry about having a CD full of aliases pointing to files you no longer have. But wait! Why are they aliases in the first place? Because the aliases point to your files, rather than copying them into the folder, which makes burning discs a great deal faster than in previous versions of Mac OS X.