Nightly backup using CD-ROM - how do i?

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Odhiambo Washington wrote:

> Now instead of the above, I would like to pipe the output
> to be written to a CD-ROM mounted on the same box. I am
> hoping burncd or some other app can be used to do that:
>
> tar czf - / | burncd -arg1 arg2 blah...

tar czf - / | burncd -e -smax data - fixate

That just puts raw data on the CD, so you'll have to pull it off as a 
file.  You can use mkisofs to build an ISO filesystem so the CD will be 
readable on other systems.  See the man pages for burncd and mkisofs.

> So every night I just mount a blank CD and let a cron job
> do the backup;)
>
> I know there could be gotchas, like when the CD is not empty, etc.

tar has problems with special files; dump is better in that regard. 
There are other problems, like the size limits of CD or DVD.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA