13.5 Backups to Non-Traditional Media

Even though you have the ability to create your own filesystems on CD- or DVD-R/RW drives and spare hard disks, you should still stick with an archiver program like tar to make your backups. The primary reason is simple: tar preserves all file attributes, including permissions and ownership. In addition, it is easier to manage full and incremental backups with tar .

If you choose to make backups with cdrecord (see Section 11.2.2, your best bet is probably to write a compressed tar archive directly to the CD or DVD with a command like this:

 tar zcf -  cdrecord dev=  dev cdrecord_args  -

You may need to experiment with the speed option to cdrecord , because the archiving command may not produce data fast enough for your recorder.

Again, remember that this command does not create a filesystem on the disc. To read from the archive, you can just use the raw device.

13.5.1 Backups to Hard Disks

Using a spare hard disk for backups is relatively easy. Create a regular filesystem on the disk and simply write your archives as regular files. You should be able to keep a fair amount of data on the spare disk if you use compression and incremental backups.