>I have just bought a DVD recorder and want to make daily backups >of some important files into a DVD-RW media. I am in doubt about >the recommended way of doing this. I am thinking about using the >following commands to be run from a script in /etc/cron.daily > > mkisofs -v -J -R -o /tmp/image.iso -V 'Backup' -A 'Backup' <files to backup> > umount /dev/dvd || : > cdrecord -vvv -eject -dev=/dev/dvd blank=fast > cdrecord -vvv -dao --eject driveropts=burnfree dev=/dev/dvd /tmp/image.iso > >Is that a good procedure? I am looking for comments on it. > >Regards. > >Romildo IMO, if your drive supports it, you should use DVD-RAM media for backup. That's because it's directly block-addressable at the hardware level, just like a hard drive. After writing, the firmware reads the data back, and if it cannot be read with sufficient margin, the block is reallocated and rewritten. I trust this more than software that performs a similar function, because the firmware environment is much better controlled. You can make e.g. an ext2 filesystem on the media (needed only once) and then do a backup with: tar cf /mnt/dvd/<some name> <files to backup> or just use a suitable cp command. If you will put only one tar file on a disk, you don't even need a filesystem. Just do tar cf /dev/dvd <files to backup> Of course, you can use compression if desired. Also, if your drive supports it, use DVD-RAM cartridges. That eliminates the need to ever touch the media, and greatly minimizes the chance of accidental damage. --Stewart P.S. I receive this list in digest form, or from the Web archive. How do I properly preserve the thread information when replying? I suppose that the Message-ID: information should somehow be included in an outgoing header, but have no idea how to do this, and what clients might support it.
