The 1394 Trade Association has published a new technical article describing how to use FireWire in Apple target disk mode applications.

Authored by Brian Karr, a 15-year engineering veteran with extensive audio experience, the article describes the various uses of TDM beyond copying files between machines including system backup and restore, disk troubleshooting and repair. Also, TDM will present any optical drives, to another Macintosh, which can be useful for MacBook Air owners or for Macs that have older optical drives that don't support dual-layer DVDs, for example.
TDM also incorporates a timesaving feature for users who want to upgrade to a larger hard drive, or to migrate files and settings to a new Mac. Most, if not all, of the tools users will need for all of this are included in OS X, according to the article.

Entitled "Using Apple’s Target Disk Mode with FireWire," the article can be found at http://www.1394ta.org/press/WhitePapers/TargetDiskMode.html . The 1394 Trade Association is a worldwide organization dedicated to the advancement of the IEEE 1394 standard (FireWire to Mac users).