Advice needed for backups

[micheal]

On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 19:26 -0700, Ian McKinnon wrote:
> Yes, but the solution of copying to fake 4GB tapes and then to DVD-R/RW
> somehow seems inelegant.  Especially when you simply do not have the room to
> hold the images before you can burn them to DVD-R/RW.  I have 500GB total on
> my server spread across four drives and I may be able to find maybe 100GB in
> 30 and 50GB chunks, but not really a solution for doing a system backup.  It
> is just seeming that optical is starting to be feasible as one DVD-R/RW
> single later basically holds as much data as an older DAT2 tape (about
> 4.5GB) not to mention dual layer DVDs and the size keeps rising every year.
> Not to mention faster (at least my old DAT2 drive seemed to take forever
> writing a tape) and maybe less prone to damage (magnets anyone?).  Though as
> always stepping on tapes or DVDs is nearly always fatal.  Of course price is
> always an issue... Hmmm a 100 pack of 4GB DVD-R is about $34 US for me...
> Plus the drives are fairly cheap..
> 
> So I agree it is something to keep an eye on.  The packages I am looking at
> so far are...
> 
> Mondo seems to be able to do CD-R... Might be something to keep an eye on to
> see if they incorporate DVD tech.
> http://www.mondorescue.org/
> 
> 
> BackupEDGE seems to be a commercial product that supports DVD-R/RW
> http://www.microlite.com/
> 
> Cdbkup cdbackup multicd RAB.....
> 
> Ian
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/12/05 5:16 PM, "Pedro Fernandes Macedo" <webmaster at margo.bijoux.nom.br>
> wrote:
> 
> > Michael A. Peters wrote:
> > 
> >> I've tested none so I can't recommend one, but I definitely want to
> >> watch this thread.
> >> Amanda seems to be the standard for a long time now, but I believe it
> >> only works with tape drives (is it possible to use a loopback device as
> >> tape drive and then burn the image??)
> >>  
> >> 
> > 
> > I use it to backup to HDD. In my configuration , it emulates a set of
> > 300MB tapes that you can burn to disk (the tapes are only a tar.gz file
> > with a text preamble. This preamble even has instructions on how to use
> > dd and tar to recover anything directly from the file , or you can use
> > the amrecover tool to automatically recover what you need.
> > As for DVD, I dont know if amanda supports it. But then , you can always
> > make a backup to disk using fake 4GB tapes and then after the backup is
> > done , you simply copy it to DVD.
> > 
> > As for it being a standard.. It is an excelent tool . I've worked with
> > it on my last job as sysadmin and it helps a lot. No need to have tape
> > drives and manually searching for a file on all tapes.. Just remmember
> > to backup you tape index files.. Without them , all you can do is
> > manually recover from the tapes, without the help from amrecover.
> > 
> > --
> > Pedro Macedo
> 
> 
> 

Have you looked at maybe doing something homegrown with a bash script? 
In theory a script doing this should work

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -R -J /1stdirectory
growisofs -dvd-compat -M /dev/dvd -R -J /2nddirectory
growisofs -dvd-compat -M /dev/dvd -R -J /3rddirectory

and so on.  

Just wondering, 

Micheal