I  wanted to backup my entire Linux system. I wanted to do it by making direct copies of the files (no archiving or compression), so if I just wanted to look at one of the files on one of the CDs, I could. This also makes it very easy to restore from backups. Backing up my entire Linux system takes more than one CD, so I was running the du command on a bunch of directories to see what would fit on which CD. This was very tedious and time consuming, so I wrote multicd to do this work for me.