[ale] 26G to backup

[Brian Mathis]

32GB flash drives can be had for $25 each, and would be much more
reliable and easier to use than a stack of DVDs.  FYI, burned DVDs
only last a few years before they start to go bad.  If you don't trust
the disk, buy 2 of them and keep copies on each.

For all of your data, especially the mail archive, make sure to bzip2
it and I'm sure you will save a lot of space.  Mail is mostly text,
unless you are storing tons of picture attachments in there, so you
should see a very good compression ratio.

If you want recoverability in the case of corruption, you might want
to look into using some kind of Parchive[1] utility, such as
parchive[2], which can potentially allow recovery of data from corrupt
files.

You are overthinking this by entertaining the idea of squashfs or
something like that -- just use a standard tar or zip file and you
won't have to worry about it.  Don't make it more complex than it has
to be.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/parchive/


❧ Brian Mathis



On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Chris Fowler
<cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> I have 26G of data I want to archive and backup up.  I would want to do
> this on DVDs.
>
> I can spend a hour or so creating a perl script that will create ISOs at
> 4.4GB each, but I'm thinking this problem has been solved with a better
> script (mine not written) or some OSS software project.  I like ISO9660
> with Rockridge and Joilet, but I also like to burn some DVDs as ext2 to
> preserve all attributes (permissions, owership, etc).
>
> I'm looking for some pointers on the best way to accomplish this.  Of
> course I could tar it all up and use split. That would require me to
> re-assemble the data when I need to chase down one file.
>
> I also want to archive 100G.
>
> I plan on purchasing a 1T USB drive to be total storage of this data,
> but I do not trust that as a primary store.
>
> One prime problem is my ~/mail imap directory.  I've copied it off and
> am now using empty imap boxes.  That directory is 6G in size and will
> not fit on a signal DVD.  I've thought about using mksquashfs and then
> burning the squash as the DVD (would not mount in Winders).  My concern
> here is that future squashfs versions would render my data unreadable.
>
> All this data will be archived on 2 sets of DVDs.  One set will be in my
> office and the second set in an offsite location inside of a safe.
>
> Chris