backup on a CD-RW

[Christian Caron]

FreeBSD 4.3
HP 8210i burner (ordinary IDE burner)

Assuming that there is less than 650MB of data on the hard drive:

Is there a simple way (kind of one line) to burn the whole drive to a
CD-RW (without closing the disk, so I can erase it and backup again
later)?

Then once it's burned, is there a way that if whatever happens to the
computer, I could just put the CD-RW in the drive and copy it over the
hard drive to have my system back?

(I guess my question is also: when doing the backup, is it copying
everything, and when copying back to the hard drive, is it copying an
exact image so the computer will never see a difference between before
and after?)

Thanks!

Christian

[Ean Kingston]

I do this (with an Acer) and my answers are as follows:

Christian Caron wrote:
> FreeBSD 4.3
> HP 8210i burner (ordinary IDE burner)
>
> Assuming that there is less than 650MB of data on the hard drive:
>
> Is there a simple way (kind of one line) to burn the whole drive to a
> CD-RW (without closing the disk, so I can erase it and backup again
> later)?

Not cleanly. I couldn't find a way of getting mkisofs to stream data
directly to burncd (for ide cdrw drives). I create an iso image on disk
and write that to the CDR.

> Then once it's burned, is there a way that if whatever happens to the
> computer, I could just put the CD-RW in the drive and copy it over the
> hard drive to have my system back?

That is what I do (and did for my last backup) and it worked.

> (I guess my question is also: when doing the backup, is it copying
> everything, and when copying back to the hard drive, is it copying an
> exact image so the computer will never see a difference between before
> and after?)

Nope. At least not my way. The mkisofs program generates files called
".directory" and "TRANS.TBL" which show up in various locations
throughout the image. You have to filter them out on your copy back.
You also have to remember to copy hidden files.

Additionally, you aren't going to get special files and may not get
links copied correctly.

I do this for the home directories (and some other data files) only. So,
all I need to do is cleanup links when making the image, and filter out
those extra files needed by the ISO image.

Someone else mentioned (a while back) that he pipes a tarfile directly
to his cdrw and it works fine. Just don't expect to read it on a windows
box.

> Thanks!

You're welcome.

> Christian

--
Ean Kingston (eanki...@home.com)
I recently lost my job due to downsizing. If you are
interrested in a UNIX sysadmin with security
experience, drop me a line. See my resume at
"http://www.hedron.org/resume.rtf".