DVD Burning: ISO9660 vs. UDF

[Damian Gerow]

Thus spake cpghost at cordula.ws (cpghost at cordula.ws) [09/04/05 23:34]:
: If you're only backing up data, this is not so important, but if you're
: backing up whole systems, you may want to consider a more pragmatic
: approach:

Of course.  Were I backing up a whole system, chances are, I'd not be
dealing with 3GB tarballs; in that case, ISO9660 should work just fine.

: The real question here is: can you read UDF from a freshly installed
: system without having to install additional programs, and without
: having to restore from that very UDF backup? Or, asked differently:
: can you actually READ your UDF backups when booting from the fixit CD?
: 
: When doing backups, it's always best to be really conservative about
: the formats you use.
: 
: If your file is >1GB, you could always split(1) it into 1GB chunks
: before running growisofs (be sure to document it in some way though,
: e.g. fileN.1o4, fileN.2o4, fileN.3o4, fileN.4o4).

split is a pretty handy utility.  It's saved me more than once, and I /was/
considering using it again here.  The question, in this case, was a little
more academic: is it /possible/?  If so, how?  I didn't want to address the
"Is it a good idea?" aspect of my approach.

Luckily, in my case, the system I'm backing up is a, "Oh, we just got
hacked, here's a few dumps for the entire system.  Now we need to flatten
and re-install."

I'm backing up more for just-in-case purposes; I will never, ever be
'required' to pull the data from this backup.  I may, one day down the road,
be curious as to something that was on the system, but it's been about six
months since the re-install, so the likelihood of me needing the data again
is about as close to zero as you can get.  So, again, this was more of a
can-I-do-this question than a should-I-do-this question.

But thanks for the pointers, anyhow: I had never used dump's tape length
option (now, does dump for ext3 handle it as well...).

  - Damian