On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 03:28, Eben King wrote:
> > So I back up the installation of that Other OS by basically creating a
> > partition image and compressing it with bzip2 (note: bzip2's output is
> > less than 2% smaller than gzip's, but it takes MUCH longer to create).
>
> Consider lzop if you're worried about speed, comparison of how much you
> can fit on a CD and how long it takes:
> http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0204c/sam0204c_s1.htm
Sounds promising; I'll try it. Found http://www.lzop.org/ .
> > A 13 GB partition compressed to 8G. I split into two chunks, each slightly
> > smaller than a DVD.
>
> Okay, now you're making your "backup" almost totally _inrecoverable_.
> If you have even a _single_ byte error on _either_ DVD, then you
> basically toast your copy. Not good.
It would be vulnerable to damage (on one level or another) no matter what
simplistic method I used to divide it. That archive contains one 13GB
file, an image of an NTFS filesystem; the System Rescue CD uses kernel
2.4, which can't write to NTFS filesystems, so I can't do a file-level
backup. Not that I trust XP to store all its needed information in
Linux-readable files anyhow...
Is there any way to store enough of a parity check to recover from errors?
> Consider:
> http://freshmeat.net/projects/afio/
>
> afio is USTAR (cpio = 5KB blocks, tar = 10KB blocks) compatible,
> per-file compression inside archive, inherent "split" functionality,
> etc...
>
> You could use afio to make individual archives that are 500MB or so,
> then make an .iso of that for DVD to make as many DVDs as you need. And
> you are _only_ backing up the files you need.
Won't help; see above.
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