On Fri, 2005-07-01 13:26, Pedro Fernandes Macedo miswrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
> > Angela Kahealani wrote:
> >> man man
> >> man dump
> >> man restore
> >>
> >> works great with DVD-RAM cartridges.
> What is a DVD-RAM cartridge?
see below...
> I'd avoid to use dump/restore.. Use tar + gzip or tar + bz2. You'll
> get good compression rates and all permissions will be kept.
> If you use dump , you're copying *everything* from the disk,
> including the data structures used to store the data and permissions
> on disk, which is a waste of space.
which, considering SE-GNU/Linux(TM-Richard Stallman / Linus Torvalds)
is *bad*, why?
> And I think he meant DVD-RAM disc?
I'm the one using DVD-RAM disks as tapes...
yes, you can also partition them, format them, install filesystems on
them, and mount them as hard disk partitions (which write *slowly*).
I use the Matsushita (Panasonic) series mostly:
hda: MATSHITA DVD-RAM LF-D311, ATAPI DVD-ROM DVD-R-RAM drive,
1024kB Cache, UDMA(33)
hdb: MATSHITA PD-2 LF-D110, ATAPI DVD-ROM DVD-RAM drive,
2048kB Cache, DMA
hdc: MATSHITA CR-585, ATAPI 24X CD-ROM drive, 128kB
Cache, DMA
hdd: ASUS CRW-5232AS, ATAPI 52X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive,
2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
> Because my DVD burner works with
> DVD-RAM and it is a disc like any DVD, except that it's golden and
> works pretty much like a big UDF filesystem (like those packet
> writing apps that windows used on CD-RW) -- Pedro Macedo
Even the first generation "DVD-RAM" drive (hdb above) which writes
single sided 2.6GB disks (format out about 2.3GB) or
double sided 5.2GB disks (format out about 4.7GB) goes beyond the 2GB
barrier of some old software/systems to handle either:
files of length greater than 2GB
file-systems larger than 2GB
so depending upon how you partition, format, and which filesystem you
use on a DVD-RAM drive (noatime recommended for speed), you may run
into 2GB barriers which you don't see when you treat the cartridge as a
"tape" of greater than 2GB length, which various versions of tar (e.g.
s-tar (star)) and/or dump/restore use with no problems. This has "just
worked" since Redhat9 (maybe earlier?)... I've not encountered anything
that couldn't handle these cartridges as raw block devices (tapes).
Since dump/restore manages multiple volumes and detects end of tape
without you telling it volume size, it's pretty much a no brainer...
and DVD-RAM offers the unique advantage of protecting those
scratch-prone fingerprint-prone dust-prone optical disks safely
protected in a cartridge... your 5.25" Diskette of the modern day.
I've found .tgz's written to DVD-RAM are infinitely portable... and,
oh, yeah, when you get to a drive that won't accept the cartridge, you
take the single sided disk out of the cartridge and all drives treat it
as a DVD-ROM you can restore from or tar -vxzf /dev/dvd-ram
WIth a write life of 100,000 versus {C/DV}D-RW's 10,000 cycles.
A backed-up computer user is a happy computer user :-)
--
All information and transactions are non negotiable and are private
between the parties. All rights reserved without prejudice, Copyright
2005 Angela Kahealani http://www.kahealani.com/
