Re: xorriso as a backup &/or archival tool

[Bob Weber <bobrweber@gmail.com>]

Recently I was suggested I read   

   https://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso/

and

   http://scdbackup.sourceforge.net/main_eng.html

which led to exploring "afio archives" and "zisofs compression".

Have you considered rsync.  I wound make sure that a backup system would handle all the file attributes a modern linux system uses.  I have a few files I made immutable so programs cant change them on me.  Your 10TB drive could even be located on a separate system.  rsync compresses files as they are transferred so network bandwidth shouldn't be a problem ... assuming at least a 1gb connection.  rsync doesn't compress the files  on the destination though. 

The simple command:

rsync -aHAXxv /  bkup:machine1/root

Would copy the root filesystem on the current machine to the bkup machine in the directory machine1/root.  The word bkup could be a DNS or host file entry or just an ip address.   

The directory machine1 could be a mounted partition or just a directory on a large ~10TB filesystem .... an advantage that you wouldn't need to worry about the size of the disk you are copying.   The lower case x option causes rsync to only copy one file system ( root / ) if you wanted to copy the home directory separately if it was mounted on a separate partition on the source system.

Another advantage to this system is you can see/access every file just where you expect it to be ... no mounting of a iso file system or using another program to access the extended iso.  Also, I'm not sure I would rely on flash drives as a long term backup.  The bits are stored as a small electric charge that could dissipate over time.

...Bob