Hello,
Rescue rescue

cauchemar, crash hdd

Is there some solution, in that direction?
How to backup a 1 Tera bytes Harddisk to DVD without X ?
growisofs is installed
(no compression or eventually yes, but no DVD dependencies)

Is there scripts under console?

"Is there scripts under console?" That's where they were invented. And it wasn't so long ago that no computers had graphical displays, and yet, people were actually able to work with them and didn't lament over what they were missing.

Read up on tar, split and growisofs. Tar will create a reliable archive of all the files on the hard drive, split will break the archive up into DVD-sized chunks, then growisofs will burn the resulting files to a series of DVDs. I can assure you this method works, I have done it many times.

Don't assume you can put 4.7 GB on a DVD. While deciding what size to make the pieces of the archive, try for something a little more realistic, like 4.5 or even 4.0 GB (in which case 500 MB per piece makes sense).

But don't try to write the original files piecemeal directly to DVD as regular files -- that way is the dark side. You are much better off saving a compressed, segmented archive that can reliably be recreated by tar. Remember all the goofy things an ISO9660 filesystem is famous for -- mangling file and path names, a dinky maximum file size, and general cussedness.

I think a better way to resolve this is to use dd. Do some reading up on it or consider the information presented in this thread:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/

To burn to a dvd,
substituting the path to your burn device for /dev/burner. Also, ensure that this is the proper write speed for your device.

thank you !
well I means that I can split the several folders? there is lots of folder of >4gb. also the folder path can be too deep for growisoformat, or being compatible dvd ... ?
Well I study it

If you try to write the original filesystem to the DVDs as a filsystem, you will regret it. Please read my original post above -- use a tar archive. A tar archive avoids the problems inherent in an ISO9660 filesystem.

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they are just data, no filesystem

Regarding
growisofs -use-the-force-luke=dao -dvd-compat -J -R -l -f -Z /dev/burner -speed=16 /path/to/burn

i got a dvd burning crash error, with genimage.... to say
on my first dvd trial

then didnnt do more yet

Not surprising. You need to ask yourself what is going on. A DVD can contain 4.7 GB -- and actually, a bit less than that. If you start streaming data to a DVD burner, it will gasp and choke once it gets near 4.7 GB.

So stream the data into something like "split", break it into chunks, and burn groups of chunks onto individual DVDs. If you set a chunk size of 500MB, chances are 9 of those chunks will fit onto a single DVD.

And remember, if you try for larger chunks, ISO9660 filesystems have a maximum filesize of 2 GB. Again, whatever you do, don't try to duplicate the original filesystem on DVDs. Most people who try to do this end up sounding like Darth Vader after the third day of trying.

The drawback to imaging the entire drive is that you will burn a lot of DVDs with nothing useful on them. The drawback to saving the actual filesystem on DVDs is it won't work. Which leads back to my first post on this thread -- use "tar" to read and compress the entire filesystem, use "split" to split up the tar archive, and burn it to DVDs.

Why not purchase another 1TB disk, put it in an enclosure, hook it up as an external USB disk, issue the following command before you going to bed
and have a 100% clone, bootable if you wish, available in the morning?

I reckon the cost may be double that of the DVD but your hard disk is reusable, faster, and in one piece.

You may have better luck using dar rather than tar. It is written to produce cd or dvd sized slices, and supports security attributes. However, there are tar options to produce fixed sized slices as well. For a file backup, only back up directories that make sense. Don't back up /proc or /sys. They are dynamic (psuedo) filesystems. Don't backup /dev. It is created when booting. Don't backup /tmp. That would be a waste of time. Backup symbolic links as symbolic links. Also use "sudo fdisk -lu" to list the partition table. Save it or print it out. This will allow you to create a new partition table if you need to replace the hard drive.

IMHO, getting an external 1 or 2 TB drive, formatting it in a Linux filesystem, such as ext3, mounting it and producing the tar output on that disk would be a better way to go than burning slices of a backup to dvd. How do you intend to restore from the backup when it is split up on different discs? It is possible to cat together the slices, and pipe that to dd (for an image backup) but you need to create a fifo file for each disc. Otherwise the end of the file on the disk will cause the pipe to break.
You also need to be careful you don't get the discs in the wrong order and if you have a read error on one disc you are stuck (unless you use an offset for the others).

error

In the O'Reilly book Running Linux the author recommends cpio over tar for backing up data, as he says it is a more reliable method of archiving.

Well did you try using the -joilet-long switch? You could also change the names of the files or remove the -J switch altogether if you don't need it. It also is more reliable to burn at a lower speed like -speed=1

I hope you do realize that if it's a full 1 TB, it would take around 223 DVDs to back it all up.

Anyway, this is the command I use:

Change the speed accordingly.

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Nice! ...and that's assuming that the drive doesn't break; then'd be 223 DVDs and a new DVD burner. All in all I vote for the external HDD, much cheaper and faster, and you can boot off it too in a pinch.

Or it would take you say 20 dual layer blu-ray, at a cost of about $400 for the disks (plus a possible $300 for the drive if you don't have one). Compare this to $60 for 300 DVD-Rs (but it would take a while, and where would you store them).

Yeah, it would be much cheaper and better to use a HDD ($80 for 1TB in best case), not that I consider it a backup method tho.

I was thinking that 223 dvd. the pc can creates 223 LST files with the content of files :
dvd222.lst
and then begins burning

sure that there a big big problem once we need to backup such amount of dvd because there is no solution up today under linux a tar.gz will be very huge
splitting rar would avoid names failures, but if one dvd is scratched all is lost, and it'll ask all the time the first DVD.

any innovative solution guys?
Any command are very very welcome, thansk for above, for the growisofs command. I already made or lost lot of dvd's trying and failing burning with growisofs
more than 10-15 dvds
can I simulate it btw?

I am out of ideas .... (but it'll be on dvd, cuz I successfully after a hdd crash recover most the data)