Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 07:30:45 -0500 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen), "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1011453837.c70e1f@mired.org> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HOWTO -- backup onto CDRs? Message-ID: <001601531120f12FE6@Mail6.nc.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <ukk7ukwzrk.7uk@localhost.localdomain> References: <15426.33499.296182.78699@guru.mired.org> <15426.63500.847866.284422@guru.mired.org> <ukk7ukwzrk.7uk@localhost.localdomain>
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On Monday 14 January 2002 01:31 pm, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1011453837.c70e1f@mired.org> writes:
> > I wouldn't recommend writing anything directly to the CD. That thought
> > just bothers me. Maybe if I could get dump to write CD-size chunks
> > direct to cdrecord and prompt for the next one, but even then...
>
> I wander if he just meant to avoid the mkisofs step. Is it ever
> possible to write directly to the CD (successfully)? I doubt it.
I'm not sure if I'm the "he" here (the conext got cut a little *too* much
here methinks), but I meant to use dump to a temp area before using mkisofs +
cdrecord/burncd. Though it is possible to skip the mkisofs entirely.
> Or maybe he meant to avoid saving the archive to hard disk by piping
> it to the CD burning program. I don't know if even the fastest system
> could do that, but it's easy enough to test and should be safe enough
> since the burning program will tell you if you don't feed it data fast
> enough.
I did this all the time under Linux; even with a P-450 it worked just fine as
long as the system wasn't overtaxed (as in, load < 2), using the stdin
feature of cdrecord. I tried with burncd under FreeBSD and had no success,
though. Of course, cdrecord doesn't support stdin input so I had to set up a
named pipe but I don't know why that would be a problem in and of itself.
I just tried it once and then stopped trying to play with it, though, so I
might have just done something wrong. It had the substantial (to my mind)
drawback that it inhibits a proper progress report and that alone made me
less motivated to try it. (When I did it under Linux I was so short on disk
space that it was flat-out impossible for me to do it any other way, which
motiviated me to try harder to get it to work.)
> A NOTE ON "dump" USAGE: I see a problem with using dump in that the man
> page says it doesn't dump files and directories with the "nodump" file
> flag set. That seems to mean that to do a backup with confidence, one
> would need to run "chflags" on everything one intends to dump. Not a
> big problem if one remembers to do it; it just lengthens the process.
This would normally be considered a feature.
PS: Another drawback of dump is that I, for one, have been known to switch
O/S's on a semi-regular basis, so an O/S-specific format naturally goes
against the grain. But I'm probably committed to FreeBSD for the "forseeable
future"; I now get hardware known to work with it rather than getting
hardware and then trying Unixy O/S's 'til I find one that works, which was my
former mode of operation.
--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
-------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! (let him go home) <-----------
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
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