I'm trying to do a fairly comprehensive system backup to CD-R. The amount I have to backup is much larger than the free space on the system, which in turn is larger than a CD-R.
This means I'm interested in compression and streaming solutions. I just tried afio -o -Z piped to cdbackup, but this gave me an error after a bit. I assume this was because cdbackup ran out of things to write while afio was busy compressing (see error below). I see afio's examples sketch out using blocking and cdrecord directly, but I have a feeling I may run into the same issue. Is there a way around this, for example setting up some kind of buffered pipe so I don't run out of input? I was tarring up little chuncks and writing them to CD, but my chunks got too big and this got tedious. Also, though I've always used tar, I understand it's a very fragile backup scheme and that afio (or maybe cpio--couldn't quite tell) is safer for archiving. Any comments? By the way, here are two helpful sites I've culled from previous messages: http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/backups.html http://www.linux-backup.net/app.gwif.html The problem is a lot of the stuff doesn't address the peculiarities of CD-R. Final question, about what to back up. Karsten Self's nice page (first reference) says some parts of /var are good to backup. Which ones? Also, I have a nagging feeling that some of /lib or /usr/lib has some customizations (vague memories of editing or adding files there, maybe for browser add-ons...). Thanks for any info or advice. --- error while writing to cd ------------ cdrecord: Input/output error. write_g5: scsi sendcmd: no error CDB: AA 00 00 01 F4 28 00 00 00 1F 00 00 status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION) Sense Bytes: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 12 00 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0 Sense Code: 0x24 Qual 0x00 (invalid field in cdb) Fru 0x0 Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]