I want to backup my system using my cdwriter. What is the best way to backup using CD-RW's?

Is it a case of backing up /etc /home? Then in the event of needing to restore, just using the distro CD's to get a working system then just copying the backed up /etc and /home?

That's how I do it. Not as nice as tape, but as long as I have another copy of my stuff I don't much care. What I actually do is have my old 486 machine run a script overnight which copies all the stuff from the main machine and it's server into a zipped tar file. That copy on the old machine is my first line of backup. Every so often I burn those archives onto CD just to be sure.