DVD Burning: ISO9660 vs. UDF

[cpghost at cordula.ws]

On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 09:48:51PM -0400, Damian Gerow wrote:
> Thus spake Damian Gerow (dgerow at afflictions.org) [09/04/05 21:33]:
> : There are a couple of ways I can work around this, but I was wondering, how
> : does one burn a UDF filesystem to a DVD (or any medium, for that matter)?
> : Or, how can I coax CD9660 to like files that big?  (I'm near positive I
> : can't.)
> 
> Answering my own question: mkisofs supports '--udf' as a way to enable an
> alpha-quality pseudo-UDF filesystem.

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:

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).

Another way is to tell your backup utility to create chunks <1GB.
dump(8) can do this for you. gtar perhaps too (--tape-length).

Cheers,
-cpghost.

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