You will then be prompted to give the disc a name, and to select the burn speed. Once you’re happy with the contents, click on the Burn button. That should create aliases to them, ready for the burn process. Then drag the folders you want to burn to that disc. You should then be prompted as to what you want to do with it: Open Finder is the correct action if you’re going to burn from the Finder. This ensured that duplicated files there wouldn’t take space up in any backup made while burning the BD archive disc, although it’s a bit more complicated to keep them out of local snapshots, which would require a temporary volume excluded from backup. As this process can take a while, I did this in a folder which I had already added to my Time Machine backup exclusion list. In my case, this wasn’t necessary, and the drive proved completely compatible with my M1 Mac and Monterey.Īssemble the folders containing files you want to burn to BD. Pioneer and other manufacturers provide downloadable updates together with utilities to update firmware.

The version installed should be displayed in System Information, in the Disc Burning section. Once you’ve connected your drive, check that its firmware is up to date.

You’ll not want to waste any! I chose Verbatim branded discs, again a longstanding and reputable manufacturer. If the last blank optical discs you bought were DVD-R, you’re in for a shock over the price of BD media, particularly M-DISC, which cost around $/€/£ 4 for 25 GB, and $/€/£ 20 for 100 GB. You will need to check specifications carefully to ensure that your criteria are met. Unfortunately, manufacturers often offer a bewildering variety of models which appear very similar, with only subtle differences in their model numbers.

longstanding and reputable manufacturer.

I would have preferred USB-C, but currently that appears too difficult Some older drives require two USB-A ports, this model only requires one.

support for a wide range of BD media, particularly M-DISC, which is intended to be archival in quality.

I selected a Pioneer BDR-XD07S for the following reasons: There’s a wide choice of Blu-ray burners claiming to be compatible with Macs. This article steps you through how to do this in Monterey, here running on a Mac Studio M1 Max. If you want to store substantial archives of important files, the only affordable option is to burn them to Blu-ray disc.

How to use burn for mac