How to properly mount a DVD-R/W drive and how to use it from the command line?

Olaf Greve o.greve at axis.nl
Thu Oct 6 06:48:13 PDT 2005


Hi all,

Thanks for the excellent replies regarding this!

Regarding the mounting: indeed I do have a proper /etc/fstab, so I'll 
use mount /cdrom then.
Tnx for explaining about the need to mount it in ISO-9660 format, and 
that the 'ro' flag is correct after all. :)

So, the remaining thing then is how to set-up a proper strategy for 
letting cron do automatic back-ups to DVD.
Regarding that, most is clear now; a few additional questions/observations:

> I also do backups on DVD+RW, but this is a more 'tricky' job if it is 
> done the automated way.
> One possible way is to use 'growisofs' (found in 
> ports/sysutils/dvd+rw-tools). But this tool needs 'root' or some 
> workarounds when used via 'sudo' (you can not use growisofs via sudo the 
> direct way!).

Running it as root is no issue. The machine is mine, so I can configure 
whatever I like as root. By now growisofs has been mentioned a few 
times, so it seems like that (either running from cron, or manually) is 
the best way to go then!

Soooo, if I understand it correctly, growisofs may be either itself able 
to create ISO images and burn those, or if not, just use ISO images 
created by mkisofs.

Then, mainly out of curiosity: at present the size of the back-ups is 
less than 2GB, though the low cost of DVD-Rs doesn't create a need for 
it, it would be cool if I could burn 2 back-ups on 1 DVD. Are there any 
easy options for that as well, or would it be better (read: a heck of a 
lot easier) to simply not bother with that, and just burn one back-up 
per DVD, and just close the session (hence losing the additional amount 
of free space)?

> Hope this helped a little bit. There are sophisticated ways of doing 
> backups via DVD-+RW/DVD-+R with shell scripts, so use the search 
> function of the mailing lists.

Definitely, thanks a lot! I now know where to start looking and how to 
go about it. I hope to be able to get the rest going myself by doing 
some RTFMing in man, my back-log of messages from the FBSD lists, and/or 
Google. :)

Finally, regarding the cross-posts: I did that as the machine runs the 
AMD64 version (hence inclusion of the AMD64 specific list), but the 
question also seemed (at least partially) general enough to be asked on 
the regular FBSD list. I'm sorry if by doing so I went against some 
written or unwritten list etiquete, and if so, after this message I 
shall make sure not to do so again. :P

Cheers!
Olafo


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