On Monday 07 August 2006 17:23, Keith Christian wrote: > Having gotten a new internal DVD burner, I'd like to know the best > way to burn a directory of files to a DVD for system backup. (Also, > I'd rather burn the DVD using a command at the BASH prompt instead of > from a GUI.) The capacity of the DVD is 8gb, write speed is 16x, and > the size of the directory to be burned to the DVD is about 7gb so > there should be plenty of space.
I know this is not exactly what you are asking, but may I suggest that you take a look at mondo. It is a suite of tools for making self contained backups. It uses many existing tools like cdrecord as backends to accomplish necessary tasks. It has a simple and intuitive ncurses based semi-graphical front end. It is possible to make a complete backup on a set of bootable CDs or DVDs. The defaults are reasonable. You can create a complete backup of your system by hitting enter a few times and feeding it disks when it asks. It is also possible to run mondo from the command line, lending it to automated backups from cron, etc. You can take the disks to another machine, boot the first disk and restore your system. I did exactly that to migrate a sarge machine at work to a different box. The new/old box was a surplus Windoze machine. Different hardware, different disks, different everything. When I booted the first disk and told it to restore, it noticed that the partitions were different, asked if I wanted to repartition, and dropped me into fdisk. I set the partitions I wanted -- different from the old box -- and continued with the restore. Once the restore was done mondo noticed the new partition structure, asked if I wanted to fix lilo.conf, and dropped me into vim. I ran lilo, popped the last CD out and rebooted. Presto, I had my box up and running on a totally different set of hardware. I have heard people talk of bare-metal restores as a great and painful adventure. Thanks to the mondo suite, mine was totally painless. The actual backup and restore took a while writing and reading the CDs, but my actual interaction in each case was maybe five or ten minutes. Recommended. -- Bud Rogers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> KD5SZ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
