Backing up to DVDs

Paul Bryan pa_bryan at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Nov 8 14:34:02 EST 2002


On Friday 08 November 2002 14:04, Kim Holburn wrote:
>
> 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.

Unless you encrypt the files, the permissions make no difference. You can set 
the permissions to whatever you feel like. I'll mount it on my own box that I 
have root access to. Hey presto, I can read the lot.

>
> >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.
>

You could format the CD/DVD as UFS. Then you can read/write to it no 
problems. We used to do that with DVD-RAMS for backups. I don't think there 
were any problems with DVD-R either but could be wrong as you do need to 
format it before writing. You can then mount the media as you would for any 
other file system. What I don't remember however, was if it maintained file 
permissions. Some sort of archive is usually the best bet anyway.

Cheers,
Paul.



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