Backing up to DVDs

[Michael James]

With the price of DVD drives falling below $700 and media at $5 per 4.7Gig
 that's a lot of Gigs before you have spent even the price of a tape drive.

Has anyone built a system around them?
Say fortnightly full backup/archives to DVD
 and incrementals to rewriteable CDs?

I had a go on a Mac, used mkisofs under Linux.
FTPed it across and burned it using Roxio but it stuffs the permissions.

Of course (if I'd thought about it) everything turns out unwriteable,
 but also everything turns out readable, even shadow etc.

Damn,
 I can't just have a backup I can drop into a tray and cd into
 to see file contents, ownership and permissions.

Or could I? How about burning the ISO as a file.
Then mount it instead of the disk?
But maybe ISO doesn't handle writeable files, no reason it should.

Well what about tar then,
 no theoretical reason I can't "mount -t tarfs /cdrom/image.tz /mnt/"

Do any tools exist like that?

Thanks for any pointers,
michaelj

PS: I have long thought that the function of a backup system
     (what's changed and keep me a copy)
     is very close to the function of an intrusion detection system,
     (what's changed and should I be worried)
     and the guts of the most elegant approach are already written in rsync.
    But then I've always been an rsync fan.
-- 
A right not exercised is a privilege
a privilege not exercised is illegal.

Michael James			michael at james.st
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