Re: DVD Writing

[scdbackup@gmx.net]

Hi,

> -use-the-force-luke does work exactly as you thought and explained.

One should mention that in the growisofs man page.
I would propose the paragraph with "-Z  option  non-interactively".


> All I need to do now is sort handling files greater than 1GB.

2 GB minus 2 kB is said to be the maximum safe size of
a file within a ISO file system.
Everything up to 4 GB (minus ? kB) seems to be possible but
is of questionable readability. Check with every single
intended reader system.
I understand that with mkisofs 4 GB is the absolute limit for
a single input file.

Since you work with a single tar file, consider to
write the file raw to DVD 
  growisofs -use-the-force-luke -Z /dev/cdrom=mytarfile.tar
resp. on the fly :
  tar cf - ...your.tarfile.content... | \
  growisofs -use-the-force-luke -Z /dev/cdrom=/proc/self/fd/0
That would not be mountable but readable by
  tar tf /dev/cdrom
About readbility with MS-Windows i quote Andy :
  "tar ztf '\\.\d:' and there're other ways... a."

As an alternative consider backup projects like
  http://www.serice.net/shunt/
which produces automatically chopped tar files wrapped
in ISO9660.

My own project creates either ISO9660 trees where after mount the
files are accessible directly or afio archives which are written
raw to DVD. 
  http://scdbackup.webframe.org/main_eng.html
For dealing with single files >= 2GB  it needs a disk buffer of
up to 4.7 GB, though. You will get them backed up in pieces and
during restore will have to put them together by hand.


> Aren't DVDs fun !!

Yes, they are.

But don't forget to checkread them. I have experienced DVD-RW
which silently returned false content. No i/o error but 
simply a non-matching MD5 checksum when checkreading them.
I had a DVD+RW which alernatingly returned correct and 
non-correct checksums. After the next re-write it was ok.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas