[SOLVED] Backup large sets of files to multiple cds/dvds

josephj · 06-05-2010, 11:54 AM

I have a large collection of pictures (12GB and growing) - way too big to fit on one CD or DVD.

I want to back them up to CDs or DVD's in standard (I think it's iso
9660) format that Windows can read.

I know how to do this the hard way - by manually selecting a pile of
pictures that will fit on one disc, burning it and then going on to the
next pile.

There must be a way to tell k3b or a similar program to do this for me - to automatically make a backup of the whole thing using as many discs as necessary.

Can anyone tell me how to do this?

I don't want to use tar or another archive/compression scheme because I
want the pictures accessible to someone with minimal technical expertise who doesn't even know how to spell "Linux".

TIA

Joe

mazinoz · 06-05-2010, 06:56 PM

I don't know of any backup program that doesn't compress files. You may like to look at kdar from kdar.sourceforge.net. It uses the KDE interface and is the most user-friendly backup I know of with a graphical interface that looks like a file manager program. I haven't used it for a while, but I know with dar [CLI] you can set the options for different sizes ie CD DVD.

Elv13 · 06-05-2010, 09:36 PM

umm, I am writing this directly on the forum, so I will probably make some syntax errors:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

rm /tmp/dvd.*

FOLDER_TO_BACKUP="/home"
SIZE=0
COUNT=0

for FILE in $(find $FOLDER_TO_BACKUP);do
   let SIZE=$SIZE+`du $FILE | cut -f1 -d" "`
   if [ $SIZE -gt 47000000 ]; then
      let COUNT=$COUNT+1
      $SIZE=0
   fi
   echo $FILE >> /tmp/dvd.$COUNT
done

This should less or more create a file list for each DVD. The next part would be to create an iso image with dd, loop mount it, recreate the folder structure in the image and copy the file. Then using growisofs or any burning command, burn the .iso.

The list will be stored in /tmp/dvd.*** where *** is a number starting from 0 representing a DVD.

josephj · 06-29-2010, 05:13 PM

All I had to do was break up the photos into reasonably sized directories by date and then run the whole thing through k3b.

Most photo software programs work best by looking at the tags on the photos anyway. They don't care what directories they are in as long as they can find them at all.

(Reasonably sized: less than 2GB and sized so that packing them together in groups to fit on DVDs won't leave too much unused space on each DVD).

I created a data project for each DVD and saved them for future use.

Since the photos are organized by date, only the last directory will change or new ones will be added, so the k3b projects will remain useful without modification.

The only thing that could change that is if I go in and substantially cull my photos. If I free up a lot of space, then I might have to redo the projects.

Joe