[svlug] What's A Good Program To Backup Hard Disk To CD-Rs?

[Karl Larsen]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Mark S Bilk wrote:

> I've been doing backups with BRU to 5GB Exabyte 8mm. tapes.
> 
> It's been pointed out to me that obviously BRU might stop working
> at some point due to kernel changes, and its backups in secret
> proprietary format would become unreadable.  Also the version 
> I have may not even be able to write to CD-Rs.
> 
> So, please pardon my naivete, what is a good open-source program
> for doing this (I'll graduate to DVD-Rs eventually)?  I don't 
> mind sitting there and putting in a new CD-R blank every two 
> minutes or so (for now).  At least they are 1/5 the price and 
> ten times the speed of 8mm. tapes.

	I would use this, since you sound like a person wanting to save 
your personal stuff. I first look at what is already on CD-Rom, in my 
case it's Red Hat 9. I have the whole system backed up. But my own setup 
and "stuff" that I write and do are all on my own directory /home/karl/. 

	So I back this up every day to another internal Hard Drive. I 
let cron do it so I don't need to remember. Less often I put this 
dirctory on a CD-Rom. I store this CD in a good friends home.

	So if we have a fire that consumes my whole home, I can still 
buy a new computer and load the whole thing back up. If the main hard 
drive stops, I just get a new one and in 1 day I should be back up.  


> 
> And are those spindles of 50 GQ brand 52X CD-Rs that Frye's 
> sells on bargain days for $7 reliable?
> 
	We don't have a Frye's but at Office Max I got 100 Fugifilm cd's 
that cost $4.00 after the rebate. They have all been fine!


> 38GB of my files are non-compressible, and 4GB are partly 
> compressible (text and binaries), so compression would only 
> save me a couple of CD-Rs and would compromise reliability
> by allowing a small error to possibly kill a whole big text
> file.  So I don't want or need compression.
> 
> Basically I just want to back up a selected directory tree
> onto as many CD-Rs as it takes.  For incremental backups, 
> it needs to select only those files modified after a specified
> date/time.  
> 
> If you do a total backup, then move a bunch of files, and then 
> do an incremental backup, are there programs that when doing 
> a restore will only put the files into their new location 
> instead of duplicating them into both old and new?  This would
> require taking a snapshot of the entire directory structure 
> (file names, sizes, locations, etc.) at every incremental 
> backup, and then using the latest such snapshot for restoring
> the total backup and all the incrementals.
> 
> I guess it would be good to have the files in the backups be in 
> a flat structure -- all in one directory instead of duplicating 
> the directory structure of the source disk -- and storing the path 
> of each file in a preamble to it.  Like tar does (and DOS backup).  
> So an error in a backed-up directory couldn't mess up all the 
> files underneath it.  
> 
> Tar doesn't do any compression, right?
> 
> I guess I could use find to scan the disk and make a list of
> the files and their sizes, and feed that to a C or bash program
> that would divide the list into CD-R sized sections and 
> individually tar the files in each one and make them into an 
> ISO image on a gig (or whatever) of free disk space, and then
> burn that onto a CD-R, and verify it against the actual files.
> 
> The sectioned list would be saved for restarting an interrupted
> backup, and for locating the CD-R containing a single file to
> be restored.  Wowie, a simple sort of find's output alphabetizes
> the list at every level, making it much easier to locate a file!
> 
> OK, I may have induced too much groaning among you experts for 
> the new year already, so I will stop now.  Any suggestions?
> 
>   Thanks!
>   
>   Mark
> 
> 
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-- 
                      
               - Karl Larsen k5di Las Cruces,NM Az ScQRPions -