Hi, > If you imagine the difference between > xorriso and older utilities, what do you think is the main difference that > can be reflected on the user experience? That is, what difference does it > make if a desktop DVD burning application make use of xorriso that it can > offer a unique feature or competition advantage over others?
The combination of mkisofs, cdrecord and growisofs still covers most needs of the users. One needs to know the particular properties of the various media types, though. I consider xorriso to be more consistent in its unified view on all kinds of storage media: CD, DVD, BD, block devices, disk files, character devices, pipes. This advantage is best visible if one uses its own commands rather than the emulations of mkisofs and cdrecord. Nevertheless, the cdrecord emulation extends the CD multi-session model for ISO 9660 images to nearly all DVD types and to both BD types. (Use option --grow_overwriteable_iso) xorriso covers the whole life cycle of an ISO image: Creation, expansion, manipulation, extraction of files. It lists the existing sessions and helps with mounting any of them on Linux and FreeBSD. (Solaris is incapable in some cases.) It has strong extra features for data backup. - MD5 checksums of each data file and of the whole session. It has commands for verifying the checksums and for printing them. - Incremental backups may be based either on inode+time, MD5, or plain comparison of file contents. - Transparent zisofs compression (readable on Linux only). - Visible gzip compression. - External filter programs for other compression or encryption. (Quite slow due to forking the filter processes twice per filtered data file.) - Recording and restoring of Linux ACLs and Linux xattr. - Fast mass extraction of files without rattling the DVD drive. xorriso is prepared to serve as slave process under a frontend program. Its options -dialog, -mark and -pkt_output allow the master to send commands into xorriso's stdin and to receive their results and messages from xorriso's stdout. Last but not least, i try to offer user-friendly support. :)) > Can you think of a few example of such use cases? I have two backup scripts. One for safely stored DVDs and BDs, the other for an 8 GB USB stick which i carry with me. The USB stick backup has its files compressed and encrypted, because it might get lost on the street. File names and attributes are not encrypted. This allows to mount the stick and to copy the encrypted files on about any computer. The backup contains an unecnrypted copy of the Linux decryption binary and also an unencrypted source tarball of that program. So i'd need only a Unix system and the pass phrase to recover my backup. On the other hand, a cleartext directory tree might reveil information that should better stay private. One has to weigh, whether this is a problem or not. These backups cover about 2 GB of data. A DVD+RW can take about 25 incremental update sessions. A BD is good for about 300 sessions. The USB stick can take about 200 ones with compressed files. The Volume Id of each session gives the backup timestamp: TOC layout : Idx , sbsector , Size , Volume Id ISO session : 1 , 32 , 1107596s , HOME_2011_04_02_230358 ISO session : 2 , 1107648 , 93579s , HOME_2011_04_09_230608 ISO session : 3 , 1201248 , 81831s , HOME_2011_04_16_215808 ISO session : 4 , 1283104 , 73907s , HOME_2011_04_23_225250 ISO session : 5 , 1357024 , 63624s , HOME_2011_04_30_224618 ISO session : 6 , 1420672 , 64155s , HOME_2011_05_07_080810 Media summary: 6 sessions, 1484692 data blocks, 2900m data, 1583m free Although the add-on sessions are small, they show complete snapshots of the 2 GB backup area. For details see man xorriso, section EXAMPLES, "Incremental backup of a few directory trees". For large backups i use my frontend tool scdbackup http://scdbackup.sourceforge.net/main_eng.html which composes one or more volumes and prompts the user for media. It is capable of incremental backups too, but other than xorriso it maintains a separate model of the backup on hard disk. scdbackup may use xorriso as ISO 9660 formatter and burn program. Have a nice day :) Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
