Re: cdwrite@other.debian.org

[scdbackup@gmx.net]

Hi,
 
> My purpose using RockRidge is retaining oringal ownership and
> permission of data to solve following problem;
> 
> I burnt /home/ of a FC3 box on CDs. /home/ was on its own partition.
> Then running LFS LiveCD I copied the CDs on a partition of a new HD
> [...] Later I discovered all data after
> transferred from the CDs onto the partitions became "read only" and
> permission changed from User to Root. Now I need to reinstate their
> original state, i.e. Write/Read, User, etc.

Not knowing the particular capabilities of your mkisofs version
and of your ISO filesystem driver, i would generally state that
a plain ISO tree is not the best candidate for exact 1:1 
data backup or transport. (It is my favorite for user data
backup, though, if ownership and permissions are trivial.)

mkzftree ... that's new to me ... it seems to add another
level of complexity. I would only employ such a thing if
the other open issues are settled.

With my own backup tool i advise to use afio or star format if
ownership or permissions are essential or other file types than
plain, dir or softlink are to be backuped.
mkisofs -R  does record more file attributes and therefore might
be usable with other than just the above filetypes but i would
not trust it to record really everything. Especially since you
have to cope with the possible peculiarities of the ISO
filesystem driver when reading the data.

My favorites for recording everything (but not a whole partition)
are currently :
  find | afio -o      (or  afio -oZ , rather than afio -o | gzip)
resp.
  star -c -xdev -acl -link-dirs -dump 
Maybe Joerg can propose an even better star command for your  
purpose.

One may compress the output, one may encrypt it, and one may
pipe it into cdrecord
  | cdrecord ... -
or growisofs
  | growisofs ... -Z /dev/dvd=/dev/fd/0
like one would have done with an ISO image.

To be read directly from unmounted media like from a tape device
  afio -tv /dev/cdrom
resp.
  star tvzf /dev/cdrom

You may do this with any trustworthy archiver, of course.
Not only with afio or star.

You may also direct the archiver output into a hard disk
file and use your usual burn program to put that file on
media. Then you would have to unpack it from *mounted* 
media by something like 
  afio -tv /mnt/my_archive_file.afioz

And of course, the content info options "t" have to be
replaced by the unpack options of the archivers "i" resp. "x".


Have a nice day :)

Thomas