[H-GEN] DVD Backup & burning software under Linux

[Stuart Longland]

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Greg Black wrote:
| On 2004-06-11, Stuart Longland wrote:
|
|>An idea hit me the other night, is it possible to create the tar files
|>for incremental backups, then cat them to the tape?
|
|
| Yes, although the canonical tool for this is dd(1), not cat(1).
| You'll also need to manage the data you put on the tapes if you
| do this -- at urgent restore time, it's not amusing to have to
| fuck around for hours finding the file you needed on the tape;
| you need to be able to seek to the one you want with mt(1) and
| work from there.  The reason tools like amanda exist is to help
| you manage all this stuff rather than writing your own scripts
| which will turn out to have bugs that you won't discover until
| it's a real pita.

Ahh okay, so possible, but could be more trouble than it's worth?

| And, for the purpose of this discussion, DDS-2 drives are just
| junk and belong in the dumpster.  They are notorious for failing
| in two disastrous ways.  They write data that no other drive in
| the universe will read -- you discover this when your drive
| fails and you try to read your backups with a different unit.
| And they sometimes write data that they can't even read back on
| the same drive the next day.  And they just fail completely if
| you use them regularly.  If you have data that would cost more
| than $1k to replace (and that means very little data), then it's
| worth at least a DDS-3 drive.

Ahh okay, we've got 5 such units, and so far, they've been happily able
to read each other's tapes without a hitch.  But, for the full backups,
as I mentioned earlier, we'll most likely use DVD+RWs (or -RWs) for full
backups... which (hopefully) should be readable by most computers
equipped with DVD readers.  This is the intent anyway. ;-)  It should be
trivial to grab an MD5sum of the tar file (or whatever's on the disc)
before and after the burn to verify the contents of the disc.

I'll admit, I've got a lot to learn in this department -- but I'm
getting there.  I'll certainly be watching these problems carefully.
- --
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Atomic Linux Project    <--->    http://atomicl.berlios.de/ |
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