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Multi-Disk CD Backup Solutions for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the where-are-those-CDR-jukeboxes-anyway? dept.

waldowaldo asks: "I have looked high and low for a good way to back up a server hard drive to CDs, but cannot find anything. There are good programs for collecting files and writing them to a single disk (such as cdrecord), but nothing for multiple CDs (that I can find). Anyone seen anything that'll do this?"

12 comments

  1. Backup onto multiple CD-Rs by yabHuj · · Score: 2

    ...is not a problem if you can cope with thext/command line only interface. All you need is tar (GNU version), mkisofs, cdrecord, and 700 MB free hard disc space.

    As I currently do not have access to my backup PC I only can give a rough outline of the two scripts that have to be made (here I assume you want to backup /home and have 700MB free on /tmp (and an empty /tmp/CD directory). You only call the CDBACKUP script.


    #!/bin/sh
    #-----------CDBACKUP------------------
    tar cvf /tmp/CD/backup.tar \
    --multi-volume \
    --tape-size=610MB \
    --new-volume-script=CDBACKUP.BURN \
    /home
    CDBACKUP.BURN


    #!/bin/sh
    #------------CDBACKUP.BURN-------------
    # ! please adapt properly to your setting !
    cd /tmp/CD
    mkisofs | cdrecord dev=0,5,0 -
    rm backup.tar

    1. Re:Backup onto multiple CD-Rs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      There's a more automatic way of doing this called backburner. It does more or less your scripts do, but is easy to use. It also has support for a variety of media, so if you wanted you could even backup your server onto all those old floppys you've got kicking about.

      http://w3.one.net/~bilshell/ backburner/backburner.html

    2. Re:Backup onto multiple CD-Rs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Assuming the machine w/ the CD-recorder is not the one you want to backup, could this be done over a network, too?

    3. Re:Backup onto multiple CD-Rs by Pascal+Q.+Porcupine · · Score: 1

      Yeah, just change /home to an NFS mount.
      ---
      "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

      --
      "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
      Quine "quine?
  2. Disc Backup by rdfager · · Score: 1

    Have you looked at Disc Backup - http://discbackup.home.dhs.org/ ?

    I haven't tried it yet so I can't vouch for it but I downloaded it a while ago and it claims to do backups across multiple disks.

    Bob

  3. You can use dump by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    With a proper script (basically the same ones as for tar -- see previous post), you can backup using dump and cdrecord. You should be able even to pipe the output of dump directly into cdrecord, but this is risky unless you have a hi-speed computer (and no other processes risk to interrupt you burning process - although this is a problem with any tool, not dump related). Anyway you can check the dump home page here: perso.cybercable.fr/pop.

  4. CD-RAID0 by technos · · Score: 4

    I had occasion to need a transport medium for several large video files approaching 1.8G in size each. While I could have always mailed a tape, I decided to do something more novel. CDROM-RAID0

    I created three 620M files (dd if=/dev/zero blah..), hooked them to loopback devices, mdadd'ed and mdran them, then slapped a ext2 fs across them. After writing the video to the RAID volume (Don't forget to sync!) I burned each file to a CD-RW, and included a short mount/losetup/mdrun/etc script on the first CD.

    The best part about the arrangement was that you could play the high-bandwidth video directly from the associated CD's, with no intermediary layer or jacking the buffer up.. (The 'seek' lag was roughly double normal, but I could pull a true 40X off of the three 16X(max) CDROM drives.)

    If you want more implementation detail, just ask!

    --
    .sig: Now legally binding!
    1. Re:CD-RAID0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      damn dude..thats innovative..more details please.

    2. Re:CD-RAID0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      URL's, We need info, this is very nice.

    3. Re:CD-RAID0 by technos · · Score: 2

      Unfortunatly, there are no URL's.. I never actually thought anyone else would want to do that. Actually.. Give me a day or so and I'll have all my scripts, plus a performance table up on this page

      --
      .sig: Now legally binding!
  5. am I missing something? by asqui · · Score: 1

    Hang on a second... whats with all this complicated stuff? Whats wrong with just splitting your server drive into a number of appropriately sized chunks and then burning away? If you have some mega files then you might want to cut them up, but I dont see much problem with the general idea.

    Just fashion yourself a nice script that starts from a given directory and then adds files in logical order until it hits 650MB, then feeds the batch to the burner and continues. If you wanted to be flashy you could also have a min. size parameter. Tell it nothing less than 640MB and then it can split the last file if its too big. Just cut and store it in some temp space, then add the second half to the list for the next CD, delete it when youre done...maybe even include a reconstruction script... and wham! Bob's your uncle, instant backups.

    If this is for backup purposes it doesn't really matter anyways, I mean if your server dies you'll be more than happy to play with a couple of files to reconstruct them manually, and do other stuff! Youll just be glad you have a backup, so I guess it doesn't really have to be all that streamelined. (Then again, if you have 100gigs to backup it might be worth your time to put in the effort for a script to reconstruct them when the need arises...)

    I'm sure the solution cannot be that simple -- either you are looking for something more advanced, or, whats more likely is that I've totally missed the point, and will get a few friendly flames in the time that it takes for this message to get moderated down to -4.

    Have a nice day :) Dont hate me cause I'm dumb...

  6. Backing up complete file systems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sometimes backing up complete file systems by just copying a partition using dd can be really convenient, but usually the resulting file doesn't compress well, esp. when your partition is not almsot full. To avoid that, you can simlpy write a file with all zeros to the file system until it is full and delete it again. Your resulting compressed file is about the same size as one created by tar.