I am currently trying to copy a directory of roughly 400GBs to dvd, have gotten myself stuck. I tried to tar and then split; however, I don't have enough room on my hard-drive to make a compressed tar and split it up and then burn to disk, so I need a way to tar the and compress the directory, split it, and burn to disk every 4.3GBs.

I went ahead and installed DAR as an alternative, as I hear it is designed for this type of task, but I can't figure out which way is heads or tails.

If it will help, my OS is the newest version of ubuntu 10.
Thanks for your help.

First, I would group things into sub-directories and--if necessary--split large files BEFORE doing any TARing or Compressing. Organize things so that your tar.gz archives fit on one DVD

If you need more room to generate archives, then just buy another drive (storage is cheap)

With respect to DAR, I don't know what it is, but you will need to ask a more specific question.....

Hi,

Haven't personally done it myself but from reading the DAR site it does seem like it will do what you want.

There's a great tutorial here: http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Tutorial.html

I suggest you try it on two USB Flash drives or two 1.44 floppy's first - instead of trashing DVD-R's unnecessarily.

cheers,
Yas

Why? I would be surprised if using DVDs is the best option compared with the alternatives when cost, time (personal and system), machine load, reliability and re-usability are considered.

DVDs are great for video where a few missing blocks don't matter. At one time DVDs were so much cheaper than the alternatives that the shortcomings were outweighed by price; that no longer applies.

dar is a great program but not intuitive and does not write to DVD directly so it's a two stage process of writing to disk first and then copying to DVD (and ideally a third stage of verifying that what's on DVD matches what's on disk).

When using DVDs as backup media it is strongly recommended that error detection and correction data is also written. par2 is a good utility for that. The CPU and disk IO to create such data is significant, say 30 mins per 4 GB.

As a response to why the dvd's, its what I have on hand. I need to clear up this hard-drive space so I can take another set of data (about 400Gbs) off of a supercomputing cluster before it gets deleted and the file-server that would normally store this new data is full.

In order to continue working, I need to make room in the file-server for a few months until I can afford to buy a larger file server. So at the moment all old data that isn't being currently used needs to be saved to dvd until the new system arrives.

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

External USB hard drive...