On Sat, 8 Oct 2005 10:53:46 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

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)?

TIA, Simon

I highly recommend dar. http://dar.linux.free.fr/ Depending on how much data you need to back up, mondo/mindi may be a good option, but when I tested it it didn't scale to really large servers. dar is also much faster if you add daromizer (which I wrote) http://www.catherders.com/tikiwiki-1.9.1/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=131, but daromizer does require large (16 Gb -/+ free disk space. dar without daromizer is very good, just slower. IIRC, it's a good deal faster than mondo, even without daromizer. I ran a backup for a week using mondo and it didn't complete (that's when it hit its maximum media count - what a design!) - dar took around 5 days to back up 2.2 Tb. Using daromizer it takes about 3 days. Whatever you choose, I _strongly_ suggest you do a verify pass, just to make certain that what gets written is readable again. I've seen hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work lost that way... Mike- -- Mornings: Evolution in action. Only the grumpy will survive. -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments.

On 10/8/05, Simon Roberts wrote:

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