Automated CD/DVD Archival?

An anonymous reader asks: "Our department used to use a Cedar Technologies Desktop CD-R Publisher for fully automated backup of data (~2 CDs per day) controlled by a Linux PC. The publisher just broke and we are looking into a new backup solution to automatically burn and print CDs or DVDs. Solutions for CD/DVD duplication are available for Windows and Mac (for example: Primera and Rimage [which acquired Cedar in 2000]) but not for Linux. While a Mac would be OK, none of the manufacturers seems to offer scriptability or a command line interface which is essential for our task. Tape and HD backup are not an option - the data is already mirrored on RAIDs. Has anyone set up a similar archival system using Linux?"

Comments

Perl!

[madaxe42]

Get a DVD burner, write a perl script which will once a week do a complete tarball of directories to be backed up, and burn it to DVD (tarred up, preferably, for space saving), and daily write a tarred diff of the directorys to be backed up to the DVD. You could also set it up to send you an email, or whatever, with a manifest.

Next silly question?

Re:And?

[j-turkey]

CD/DVDs sure seem like an ideal solution for making cheap (due to good frequency) backups for off-site storage. Excellent if the backups must be accrued and stored for longer than a week or two.

But pretty unreliable for long-term storage. If he's keeping backups for over 6 months, backing up to CD is usually a bad idea.

It would have been nice if the submitter had qualified why tape backup was not a possibility. At this point, we can only speculate why. (Does he/she need a read-only backup solution? Can he not afford tape? Is he ignorant?)