File names and backing up to DVD

[Tom Metro]

Nathan Meyers wrote:
> The scary thing about a single .tgz image is how vulnerable the entire 
> contents are to a single error. One bad bit can ruin the readability of 
> the gzipped image.

You can always use the rsync mode supported by some versions of gzip, 
which resets the compression dictionary periodically and provides 
re-sync points.


David Kramer wrote:
> ISO9660 is _way_ too restrictive though.
> I think what I'm gonna have to do is create a .tgz...

Wouldn't the next best fallback be to use a different file system on the 
optical disk? At one time the alternatives to ISO9660 were fairly 
common, and even more popular on the UNIX side of things. (Was it UFS 
that was used?)

How about UDF?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format

Apparently the successor to ISO9660, and supported by Linux and other 
OSs. Not sure if it will support your requirements any better, but it 
does support links:
http://homepage.mac.com/wenguangwang/myhome/udf.html#why-udf

however it doesn't support compression or encryption (natively).

If you only need to access the files from a Linux system, I wonder if 
you could use one of the Linux file systems made for storing compressed 
files in a ROM. (You'd create an 8 GB sparse file, mount it via 
loopback, populate it, then write the file to the optical disk.) Looks 
like there is precedent for using squashfs with optical media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squashfs

One of the encrypted file systems (EncFS, TrueCrypt) might also do the 
trick, with the added benefit of securing your files with encryption.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/