DVD-R/W In Unix?

Vilorman asks: "So has anyone been successful at writing DVD's in Unix? At work, we're primarily a Solaris shop and we just got an IDE CD-RW working but it's a little small. We need to archive a four gig filesystem and DVD sounds like the way to go. I do have a few concerns: how well does Solaris or Linux supoort the DVD media; and what type of drive works best under either OS (IDE, SCSI, Firewire, etc)? I've found IDE and FireWire drives but SCSI DVR-R/W still seems to be a little scarce. One would assume (from looking at the code) that Schilly's CD-Record and mkisofs would get the job done with a DVD, right?"

Comments

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Microlite supports DVD-RAM on Linux. If you want to spend a lot of money, Lineo has a pricey product.

Of course, with the new Linux kernel there is native DVD-RAM support. I can't swear to Solaris but, I'm pretty sure it's in there too. Use IDE, it's cheaper, more readily available and just as fast.

Re:Yes

[Jamie Zawinski]

DVD-R shouldn't need anything special, cdrecord claims to support DVD-R drives

I see a lot of people saying ``it should work'' or ``I read in this README that it should work'' but I haven't seen anyone standing up and saying, ``YES, by God, I have successfully burned a DVD-R on Linux.''

Because I've been searching for someone saying that for a few years now, I still believe that it has not been done, and is not possible.

Prove me wrong, please.

Re:The new iMac

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure this guy will be changing over from Solaris servers to Imacs...

Re:The new iMac

[foobar104]

I'm sure this guy will be changing over from Solaris servers to Imacs...

Maybe you were trying to be facetious or funny or something, but you just ended up looking dumb.

Take an iMac with OS X. Mount your server's filesystem via NFS. Dump the filesystem to DVD with the OS X disk utility. What's the problem?

If you don't want to back up a live filesystem, then drop to single user and do a dump, then burn the dump to DVD.

Either way, it's a hell of a lot easier to do stuff like that with OS X than it is with Windows (Unix interoperability not included) or Linux (DVD burning not included).

easy

[qurob]

DVD+RW on Linux

"It depends."

[willfe]

Ah, yes, that old favorite answer. Unfortunately, it's true in this case.

Some points of note:

• Out-of-the-box cdrecord does not write DVD-R(W) discs. You have to pay for the author's "cdrecord-prodvd" release or apply the free patches I found at http://www.abcpages.com/~mache/cdrecord-dvd.html.
• While DVD-RAM fares better than DVD-RW in Linux (DVD-RAM doesn't need that damned packet writing stuff that the gang at http://packet-cd.sourceforge.net/ haven't updated since 2.4.7-ish), it still has plenty of problems. If you hit a media error, kiss your session goodbye and prepare to reboot. And despite much marketing efforts to the contrary, DVD-RAM discs aren't readable by anything I've been able to throw them at.
• Whether you're using the "official" DVD version of cdrecord (the test version, at least, limited to -dummy mode or 1GB images) or the one based on the free patch, if you hand the Pioneer DVD-A03 "cheap" DVD-RW media, it always seems to give up. Sadly, Nero Burning ROM in 'doze writes to the same pieces of media just fine. This stings to admit, since I'm quite the Linux junkie :)
• You can forget about packet writing if you're using a DVD-RW drive, unless someone out there has updates (or something better to use) than the packet-cd project at Sourceforge. The patches there won't even apply to kernels newer than 2.4.12 (according to the mailing list), and even then it's still unfriendly and unreliable.

I would love it if someone could disprove any of the above; I have a QPS (Que!) external Firewire drive (the Pioneer DVD-A03 stuffed into a firewire enclosure) that I really wish was more reliable in Linux than it is right now. Packet writing would be lovely. As it stands now, I can write DVD-Rs okay with the free patched cdrecord, but the only DVD-RW media that's writable in Linux seems to be the one that shipped with the drive. Nothing else has worked :(

Why not tape?

[scheme]

A DLT or DDS tape drive will give you on the order of 2-40 GB per tape depending on the format you use, comes in scsi version, and is well supported under solaris and linux. You can get a decent 15/30GB DLT drive on ebay for about $100. With DLT drives, the media will cost about the same as a blank DVD, you'll get more storage capacity, better support and the option to upgrade to autoloading tape drives if your backup needs grow beyond the capacity of a single tape. Plus some of the newer tape drives will let you boot from tape and begin a restore automatically.