[ale] 26G to backup

[Richard Bronosky]

You are in really risky territory. You are trying to dream up your own
solution to a very common problem. That's rarely a good idea. If you
make a mistake like encrypting your data before you spilt it onto
multiple DVDs, then you will end up with a situation where 1 bad
sector on 1 disk will render the whole backup useless.

Here are some general suggestions:
1. You are not the first person to want this. There are solutions out
there that have been hardened by people much smarter than me, so I
don't try to create one from scratch.
2. You want to convert your email to a format where every message is
stored as a discrete file that can be extracted independently. You
don't want to have to be successful at extracting an entire directory
just to get that one important email... because backups will fail.
Everything fails, eventually.
3. You want to encrypt each file independently so that it can be
decrypted successfully even if the file next to it is corrupt.
4. Optical media will fail spectacularly.

If you really care about backups:
1. Store them on hard disks if it is very large, or flash drives if it
is reasonable to do so (as Brian Mathis mentioned).
3. Store them in duplicate or triplicate.
2. Every 2 years by new drives and copy them over. After the 2nd set
of drive copies is made (meaning you either have 6 or 9 copies of your
data), you can more the oldest drives back into your regular daily use
rotation. (This is why it's good to use flash drives. Old flash drives
that are small and hold little are more useful than old hard drives
that are bulking and hold little.) This leaves you with either 4 or 6
copies of your data depending on whether your chose to duplicate or
"triplcate".

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Chris Fowler
<cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> What I am trying to figure out now is how to back up a directory to multiple
> DVD size images. I did find a program, with source, that will allow me to
> add reed-solomon to a tar.bz2. I could use that approach and create a file,
> listing, and the src to DVD for storage in the safe. I then use a USB 1t
> drive for adhoc acceess to all this data.
>
> I would need a program that would cut up a DVD to multiple, unrelated,
> tar.bz2. Use openssl CLI to encrypt. Run it through the reed-solomon
> utility, finally create the ISO image. Seems like I need to code this.
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