[Dvdrtools-users] Re: creating an iso from bz2 file 3.5 GB

[Bryan J. Smith <address@hidden>]

From: Vijay Kumar <address@hidden>
> mkisofs: Value too large for defined data type.
> File /backup/backup-2005May23.tar.bz2 

Not to tell you what to do, but if you have a single byte error at
any point in that file, you'll lose the rest of the file.  And you
won't know it until minutes upon minutes into reading the file.

Remember, whether we are talking ISO9660 (with RockRidge
extension) or UDF, you still have a full filesystem in the media.
So there's really no need to archive the files into another.

In fact, you can even think of a ".iso" or ".udf" file as an archive
themselves.  So you're basically "double archiving" and not only
making it worse for your backup -- but more importantly, introducing
a very unreliable backup that is a PITA to restore.  Especially
if you compress the entire archive.

One of the worst backup schemes I ever read about was someone
creating a .tar.gz and then splitting the files across CD/DVDs.
Apparently they never bothered attempting a test restore --
especially after the media (especially if MO) had aged for a couple
of years.  One byte, everything after that point, toasted.

Just a consideration.  I wrote the back2cd script for a colleague who
had run into this exact issue -- lost years of backups due to single
byte errors on his media (although he was using largely CD-RW,
instead of CD-R, although he had one CD-Rs that had an error too).

It makes restoring much, much easier -- especially if you just need
a few files.  You just directly browse the CD/DVD.


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:address@hidden