Backing up to DVDs

[Kim Holburn]

At 1:39 PM +1100 02/11/8, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
>We recently were quoted around that for an internal DVD-R
>(Pioneer A05).
>
>Bob's CD backup script would be pretty easy to change to
>support DVD. Since it's all tarr'ed up, you'd get your
>permissions being saved too. No terribly difficult to browse.
>
>Antti
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael James [mailto:michael at james.st]
>Sent: Friday, 8 November 2002 1:07 AM
>To: linux at lists.samba.org
>Subject: Backing up to DVDs
>
>
>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.

If it's just to stop someone reading files, tarring won't do it.  If you write a tar file, what would stop someone taking it to the machine of their choice and untarring the shadow file?  On the other hand you want to keep ownerships and permissions so you can restore properly.

>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/"

I was thinking of that too.

>Do any tools exist like that?

Like /lib/modules/<insert mysterious kernel number here>/kernel/fs/tarfs ?

Possible?  A quick google finds a perl script:

http://www.srekcah.org/~utashiro/perl/scripts/tarfs/tarfs-1.9

and this looks promising:

http://people.type-z.org/ludo/hurd/

and of course there's the dreaded midnight commander.

Kim
-- 
--
Kim Holburn 
Network Consultant - Telecommunications Engineering
Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering
Australian National University - Ph: +61 2 61258620 M: +61 0417820641
Email: kim.holburn at anu.edu.au  - PGP Public Key on request

Life is complex - It has real and imaginary parts.
     Andrea Leistra (rec.arts.sf.written.Robert-jordan)