I currently have a work-in-progress set of Perl scripts to automate the backing up of a music library to DVD or any other removable media (BD, DVD-DL, etc.). Given that there has been some interest in Moonbase's project to do backups to hard discs (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67153), I thought perhaps there would be some interest in something like I am working on.
My motivation: ============= I've recently made huge additions to my music library as I finally got around to ripping the last half of my music collection. My habit has been to backup my FLACs to DVDs. Even though external drives have gotten rediculously cheap, I have a huge stock of blank DVDs that I should use. Though external hard drives are attractive due to ease-of-backup, I worry about the amount of data loss if one were to fail. Also, I have tons of DVDs to use, so I should use them. I dreaded the task of sitting in front of Nero and dragging folders in, burn the discs, keep track of what I burned, etc. Time is at a bit of a premium for me now, so I can't afford to deal with all of that tedium. So...I thought it would be cool to automate the process somehow. I did some research on available command line tools on Linux and found something called growisofs. I played with it a bit and it works quite well. Discs that I back up are readable on my Linux machines, my Vista machine, and my XP machines. It supports burning ISO9660:1999 images, so most any filename and directory structures will work. I don't plan on trying to read my discs with DOS, Windows NT, or anything of that vintage, so I don't think this will be a problem. The Implementation (so far): =========================== I chose to write my script(s) in Perl, mainly because I want to become more proficient with it. This is very much a prototype at this point and everything is handled by a series of scripts that generate file outupt that is used by another scirpt. Here is what my scripts do at this point: - The music directory structure is scanned and total storage size is computed for each sub-directory (presumably making up an album). This information is output to a file. Date critera can be specified to go back only to a certain date. I may add other criteria as needed. - The file is then parsed and "burn projects" are built based on a maximum storage capacity specified for the backup device. Currently, the script can't deal with an "album" that iself is larger than the size of a disc. The fact is flagged to the user can deal with it another way. Attempts are made to maximize the storage by searching for smaller albums that might fit in the remaining space on the disc. Another file is generated with the project information. - This file is then parsed and a command line to growisofs is built up and executed. The backup device is hard coded. I will implement a verification procedure using md5 sums. This will have a dependency on the auto mount point of the backup device. - Finally, I have completed a script that will take one of the project file used by the burn script and lay out on a page lables that can be cut out to put in your binder. 4 labels are printed on a page which can then be cut out. This is very specific to how I do things. Once I have this cleaned up a bit, I can make the code available to those that might be interested. At this time, I'm working mainly to my specific needs and haven't generalized much. This could change depending on interest. I do hope to bring the various scripts into a single one. I like the idea of having the data committed to files because it makes it easier to go back and pick up where you left off. For instance, I currently have about 60 DVDs worth of data to backup. I certainly don't plan on doing that in one sitting :-). What are your thoughts on this project? Thanks, -- maggior Rich --------- Setup: 2 SB3s, 3 Booms, 1 duet, 1 receiver. SuSE 11.0 Server running SqueezeCenter 7.3.3, MusicIP, and SqueezeSlave. Current library stats: 27,698 songs, 2,304 albums, 439 artists. http://www.last.fm/user/maggior Looking forward to new Porcupine Tree, Megadeth, Alice in Chains, and The Beatles Box set. September will be an expensive month :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ maggior's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9080 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67774 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
