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Linux Backup With DVD Media?
Dan asks: "Our research group just moved into a new lab, and I am in charge of organizing the computer systems. A graduate student half-joked about finding a way to get the lab a DVD burner. At first I thought using DVD for backup would be cumbersome, but then I found a few products designed for backups. I targeted a DVDRAM Jukebox by Powerfile for $4000. While it appears to be a good solution for nightly backups, Powerfile does not support Linux. After searching for topics on Linux support for DVD backup systems, I found an unsupported script that was hacked together. There must be more support out there, right? Has anyone else had experience with using DVD as an automated backup system? It wouldn't be such a good idea to spend $4000 on hardware we couldn't guarantee to work, but it would be sweet to have a jukebox DVD burner running on Linux."
Instead of complaining about it in what should overwise be an interesting thread?
I read /. every day. It's interesting, often fun, and more often than not, quite educational.
/. for public commentary is a valuable part of that experience.
Having the odd slightly-off-kilter hardware question posted on
Sure, google is easy to use, but you don't get to share the results of the effort, nor talk about the circumstances, with thousands of other geeks.
*That* is the value inherent in Ask Slashdot stuff like this.
Those that moan about it just don't get it.
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There are lots of reports that DVDs burnt on one box aren't readable/playable in another. Check out articles on www.vcdhelp.com for examples (mainly video-related).
I burnt some video CDs on different CD-R and CD-RW media and found that some friends' DVD players played some and not others, and some played none, and few played them all. I think there are similar problems with DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM. Its put me off buying a DVD burner for video just yet.
So, do you want to trust your backups to media that might not be readable on a different model device should your one blow up?
Baz
The problem as I see it is that not even DVD has the capacity to back up modern systems. The advances in hard disk capacity are vastly outstripping our ability to reasonably back them up. I have over 20GB of MP3s that I've ripped so I won't have to keep my cd collection handy. This is great, but I'm pretty much out of luck if I want to keep the stuff backed up.
Sadly, the mismatch between capacity of removable and fixed media seems to have always been the case. Years ago, I gave up trying to do periodic backups to floppy once it took 20 or so of them to do the job. Now, here I am with a CD burner with hundreds of times more capacity than those old floppy disks, and I'm still in the same boat.
I've looked at tape backup solutions, but find it hard to reconcile myself with spending twice as much (or more) on a tape drive as I did the rest of my system. If there were a decent capacity (20GB+) tape drive to be had for approximately the same price as a CD burner, I'd jump on it, and not brgrudge the costs of the tapes so much if I could reasonably expect to be able to drop a tape in the drive and have what should be essentially a reloadable volume available the next morning.
For corporate systems, DLTs and a changer is a solution of sorts if your company isn't too cheap to lay out the cash, but those kind of systems are definately not within the average home user's budget.
I still bite the bullet and do quarterly backups, but it's a major effort, mostly because I haven't found a good backup program that I can get to work for me that doesn't want a tape drive. I kinda wish BRU would introduce a version of their program that would write to CD/DVD.
My two cents. Let the moderation begin!
This is an ex-parrot!
For $4000 you should be able to get a DAT (DDS3 or DDS4) autoloader (20GB native, 40GB compressed for DDS4)...
In the long run, Tapes are still the cheapest solution for backups, in terms of $$/GB of space. Some people opt for putting some of their on-sites into cheap HDD storage, like the DX30 (3TB of IDE disk that emulates a tape library through scsi/fc interfaces), since while it's more expensive per gig, it's also a great deal faster and has nice random access compared to a tape library. However, DVDs are still gonna be slow to burn and slow to randomly access a given DVD out of a library.
11*43+456^2
If you have ever conducted a restore over many tapes (remember 6525 tapes?) you know that if tape 3 out of 5 is bad your screwed.
That's why I use afio instead of tar. bad tapes just affect the files in the bad parts of the tape since each file is compressed individually instead of as one like tar.
...apart from the name.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Boy, 5 GB doesn't sound like much these days... though I suppose it's plenty enough to back up critical data. Although drives are certainly getting bigger and getting filled up, a lot of that is non-critical cruft and bloated software that can be reinstalled from source. So, maybe 5 GBytes is okay...
One thing I worry about is the reliability of RW media. How many erase/write transitions can a DVDRW blank take? And how long does it take to "reformat" the medium and to write everything back on again?
According to the DVD+RW alliance, 2.4x DVD write is 3.32 MBytes/sec. That's faster than 2.5MBytes/sec of DLT, but tape drives erase-and-write at the same time. Supposedly AIT's sustain 4MBytes/sec (but I just looked this up, and I have never used AIT's).
It's not free, but it's faster than tar (heh, heh) and the Linux support is getting better.
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Ask Slashdot: How can I try to bullshit our purchasing department into buying a DVD burner so I can encode my DIVX copies of Sailor Moon and hentai onto DVD?
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