Hi friends,

I have several TBs of photos that are copied to multiple hard drives for redundancy. I want to make a Blu-Ray archive of them as well.

My photos are arranged chronologically by year. I’m considering making a Tar archive of a year (ex: 2018/ is 225GB) and then using the split command to cut it up into ~25GB sized chunks to burn to Blu-Ray for cold storage. My only hesitation is that if one of the discs goes bad, I would lose the entire year of photos potentially as there would be no parity in this approach.

I welcome all suggestions on a better way to do this. Manually adding up folder sizes to burn isn’t too appealing. Thanks for your time!

Instead of split use multi volume option. Each volume is accessible as if it was a single archive so losing one disk does not affect the others.

https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/man...-Archives.html

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When I want to look at my shots, I don't want to be faffing around. I backup uncompressed. Disk is cheap - make 3 separate (external) copies, it's still cheap. If you have problems use ddrescue to merge them back to a valid state.
If you insist on tar, have a look at using lz compression, and lziprecover to reconstruct using ddrescue in case of media failure. I looked at this but I have a hard time reconciling tar usage in this day and age, so I ultimately skipped testing it.

Others will have maybe better suggestions.

If you go down the path of using Blu Ray be aware that any disks of this type are subject to "rot" where the dye layers degrade over time. Be prepared to have to restore re-backup your data to new media every couple of years.

You seem to be in a similar predicament as me, but, I will build a small server to stash all my photo's and music and have them in a RAID system and to have them backed up in the cloud, you know just in case.

This was helpful. I tried a test run of it. I broke them up into 8GB volume sizes.
tar -ML 8388608 -cvf DancePhotos1.tar DancePhotos/

The resulting tar files didn't respect my folder chronology (jumbled the files from multiple sub-folders into each tar piece). And it resulted in tar:
Unexpected EOF in archive tar:
Error is not recoverable: exiting now
when trying to view the tar file contents (tar -tf DancePhotos1.tar)

I'm not sure what's up with this result.

I did the small server as well. After my primary and second backup, I have an Ubuntu server box with a zfs z1 zpool for my photos and other files as my 2nd redundancy source (third copy). I have another 8TB hdd with everything on it in a fire safe (4th source). I'd really like the Blu-Ray for one extra layer of safety.

Yes it is a real concern. I have seen mixed reports on life expectancy of optical media. Anecdotally, I have CDs and DVDs that I have personally burned that are 15+ years old and they still work. There just on a shelf (not ideally stored by any means). For my purposes, the Blu-Ray burn will be my 5th form of redundancy/archive that I won't plan on accessing unless I need to.

I'm trying to make Tar work for me in making Blu-Ray disc sized archives of my files rather than manually adding up how much I can burn to BR disc. It's my 5th source of redundancy that I won't be accessing unless a catastrophic failure occurs. So far, it's not working for me. lol.

The following thread might help. If you do not have use a script when you press return tar continues to write to the same file. Basically tar should archive the files in order basically as the output from the ls -l command.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...on-4175492196/

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Yes I used the n option to manually rename the next tar archive. So I do end up with three separate volumes as expected. But for some reason they are random and not like the output from ls -l as I would expect. Another forum post mentioned using the --multi-volume option while viewing the contents as well. Going to try that.

Fair enough.
Be aware of technology creep in addition to the bit-rot mentioned above. If such an event occurs a few years down the track, will you be able to find a compatable drive (and drivers) ?. Blueray seems to be one of those "bigger is always better" ideas that never went anywhere.

I do recall using mondo to do as you want to create isos for burning onto CD back in the day. Was my system backup, and I didn't care what order the files were so long as I had backup. Way slow, but good for its time and purpose. Hopefully you can get tar to behave as you want.

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I was never excited about Blu-Ray actually. Streaming media killed it as a platform I think. For data archival purposes, I think it's the best/most viable option currently. Aside from redundant hard drives and perhaps cloud services, there isn't a better cold-storage option. Tar is still not behaving as I would like. I get the same results on an Arch distro that I do on Debian 10.

Just as an update for anyone else reading this in the future, I was able to use tar to make a multivolume archive. Reconstituting the individual archives back into one whole archive does work. To view the contents of a multi-volume tar archive, you have to use the -M option (tar -Mtf YourTarArchive1.tar). The same result was published here..

The interesting phenomenon is that tar does not add the files to the archive like the results from ls -l would give (ex: chronologically or alphabetical file name). The files & directories per multi-volume "tar slice" are randomly assigned which still baffles me (my best guess is that it picks the files that will add up to the specified archive size?) I ran tar -Mtf DancePhotos1.tar > contents.txt and you can see exactly what files are contained in each slice.

This is not an ideal solution for backing up to Blu-Ray because if you lose one of the slices due to disc rot/failure/whatever, you may not be able to reconstitute the multi-volume archive as some individual files do span the archive slices. (Ex: half of file A is in DancePhotos1.tar and the other half is in DancePhotos2.tar). The slices aren't really their own self standing individual archive as I had hoped. Back to the drawing board!

Thanks everyone!

Shouldn't matter - see my suggestion above; use lz and keep multiple copies. When I did CDs I did two copies and kept the original disk image. If the latter ever failed (did once) I could recover the data.