Re: does debian have other utilities similar to multicd ??
On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 07:05:14PM EST, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 06:02:16PM -0500, Michael Habashy wrote:
> > I am looking for a debian/linux utility similar to multicd.
> > I need a utility to backup big directories to dvd.
> > The directories are quite big and i need the utility to figure out how to
> > put files on multiple dvds.
> > My k3b works great - but i can not feed it a directory of files and ask it
> > just copy all the files and ask me for a new dvd when you need it.
> >
> > My multicd gives error :
>
> I've never heard of multicd so I can't comment on its errors.
>
> Personally, I'd tar up the big directory, zip it (or bzip2 it,
> whatever), then pipe it through split, telling split to split it into
> sizes appropriate to your DVD media.
A neat little utility named "dar" takes care of all the splitting for
you:
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Tutorial.html
Hands on .. no fuss .. learn it in ten minutes .. has a bit of a French
accent .. but I hear the language is still spoken in some parts of the
world. :-)
I've used dar for 3+ months w/o a glitch .. did a "bare-metal" restore of
my old HDD when I switched to a faster, bigger one and nothing was lost..
nothing broke.
Relevant to the OP's quest is that dar handles splitting your backups
into manageable slices.. see the "-s" and "-S" options.
Some popular rescue live CD's include it as a standard tool .. IIRC,
it's part of the "grml" offer.
> The trick, of course, is restore since ideally you'd copy all the
> pieces to some place, cat them together into the origional .tgz and
> then untar it.
I restored from a single 16G USB stick so this was not an issue .. but
my understanding is that if your full backup lives on more than one
CD/DVD, dar will pause and prompt you to insert the medium that contains
the next "slice" .. which means that you don't need the HDD space to
"cat" your backup's instalments.
As advertised in "STEP 4" of the above tutorial, the "dar -x .." command
should take care of everything.
> I haven't tried tar's multi-volume option. I don't know if it would
> work if you tried writing out directly from tar to the raw dvd burner.
>
> Have you considered a tape drive?
Yes, and the price-tag left me speechless.
Thanks!
CJ
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