I am trying to back up my 70GB’s of digital photos to DVD. However, I
currently don’t own a Blue-Ray drive, so I need to spread it over
several discs. I used to do this often in my Windows days with Roxio
Creator Classic.
I had thought that this was called “multi-session”, but some googling
seems to tell me that multi-session means leaving a disc open for
further burning. So my question would be, what is the proper term for
what I am trying to do? and secondly, how do I do this under linux?
Neither K3b or Brasero seem to have any hints for me.
I had thought that, in the past, whenever I tried to fit too many files
on a disc k3b would automatically split the file over several discs.
However, that certainly isn’t happening now. Any hints?
Okay, it appears that K3b does not have this functionality (which I am
told is called “spanning”). In fact, none of the established linux
CD/DVD burning software does. Very unfortunate. I found two projects
that seem to be aiming at my problem. The first, multicd, looks
abandoned and lacks documentation. The second looks much more hopefull.
It’s called discspan (a python script) and it looks like it does just
what I need, except that when it tries to actually start burning the
first disc, it crashes with the following message:
Code:
/dev/sr0: 2295104 blocks are free, 4563438 to be written! write failed: No space left on device
genisoimage: Broken pipe. cannot fwrite 22528*1
This is with a blank DVD+R in the drive.
Does anyone else have experience with these tools or something similar?
A second best would be a tool that would tar up my directory into DVD
sized tarballs. Less than ideal (and rather embarrassing around my Mac
and Windows loving friends), but it doesn’t look like I have a lot of
choices.
Unfortunately partimage does not seem to be able to work with
directories, only partitions.
So now I am looking at having to create a partition, copy my files onto
it, and then use partimage to create 4GB tarballs of the whole thing and
burn each one individually to a DVD (about 18 discs)!
I’m starting to envy my dad just a bit. When he drops too many files
onto a DVD on his Mac it just starts burning them and then prompts for
another disc.
I can hardly believe that K3b lacks this (in my opinion) very basic
functionality!
Well it’s hardly basic functionality. Not everybody backs up tens of GB
of data on DVDs.
Maybe you could search to see if someone has written a text utility to
take a stream of filenames and to segment the list whenever the running
total of file sizes goes over 4GB. This would have the advantage that
each DVD is usable as is so you don’t lose the whole set if one DVD
develops a bad block, as would be the case if you simply split the
generated image.
OT Not sure what they cost where you are but i just bought a lacie 750gb
usb drive for the same price as 4 packs of (25) dvds. Enough space to
back up your whole system and more durable.
> I am trying to back up my 70GB’s of digital photos to DVD. However, I
> currently don’t own a Blue-Ray drive, so I need to spread it over
> several discs. I used to do this often in my Windows days with Roxio
> Creator Classic.
Even with BR, you’d need more than one disc for 70 GB.
> I had thought that, in the past, whenever I tried to fit too many files
> on a disc k3b would automatically split the file over several discs.
> However, that certainly isn’t happening now. Any hints?
Ah, Rikishi42, would you mind giving my an example of the correct
syntaxt for this script? I am looking at the source and I am not seeing
how I pass the source and destination directories.
> Ah, Rikishi42, would you mind giving my an example of the correct
> syntaxt for this script? I am looking at the source and I am not seeing
> how I pass the source and destination directories.
Put the script(s) in your “~/bin/”.
mkdir work/
cd work
mkdir in/
mkdir out/
Make a link copy of your data in the “in” dir:
cp -vrl originals/* in/
xsplit_dvd.py
The dir work/out/ should contain the output dirs dvd_001, dvd_002, etc…
Notes:
actually, the script creates out/ itself, if you don’t.
Real Soon Now[R], I’ll change the scripts, so they make the links
themselves from the original data.
several xsplit_… scripts exist, with hardcoded volumes. You can change
the volume yourself. In the future, the volume could be an argument.
if a file is found that is large than the block volume (a file bigger
than 4.2 GB in you case, of a file biffer than 700 MB with xsplit_cd),
that file is left in “in/” dir.
The previous point means that “in/” should be empty if everything went
well.
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Works great! Though I did make an unfortunate mistake and deleted a
bunch of the photos, Had an extra backup laying around so I think I’m
okay (though I thought I’d faint when I realized what was happening).
Now I got all my files ready to backup. Thanks a ton, Rikishi42!
> Well it’s hardly basic functionality. Not everybody backs up tens of GB
> of data on DVDs.
Well, true, but I haven’t used a CD burning app on Windows that
couldn’t do this (Windows built-in CD burning excluded).
/dev/sr0: 2295104 blocks are free, 4563438 to be written!