On 10/8/05, Simon Roberts
Hi All,
What's the accepted, best, or contender way(s) to back up large files. By "large" I mean bigger than the DVD device (which is the only backup medium I have)?
tar and growisofs do quite a good job. To create a tar archive to be written on a dvd you can issue the following command: tar cvf - -C /files/to/write | growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/proc/self/fd/0 Since growisofs can not read from stdin the appropriate file descriptor from the /proc filesystem must be provided to create a pipe. The archive is written as a track image circumventing the 2/4GB ISO limitation. To extract data from the dvd simply call tar -xvf /dev/dvd because the track image cannot be mounted. I am using this approach for a while without problems. \Steve