[geeks] Backup software (yeah, yeah, I know)

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Saith Shannon Hendrix ...

> Anyway, the problem here is that he's living on a laptop, and might  
> not have a series of 4.7GB chunks of space free.

Yeah, there is that.

This laptop has more storage than any machine I've ever had, but the
combination of Windows and low standards of data hygene mean the dam' disk
is almost full most of the time.  This does not simply the backup situation.
 
> What he probably needs is a program that create the volumes in  
> realtime so it only uses one image at a time, or even better streams  
> the data to the DVD.

Yowza!

> I still marvel that there is almost nothing like this in the UNIX  
> world, given the massive suckitude of available backup media.

Tell the tale, bro'.

> I used to use a program called cddump which automatically split  
> backups across CDs, and only took up at most one image worth 
> of space at a time.
> 
> I modified it to run with DVDs, but it was a horrid Perl script that  
> was hard to maintain and needed a big rewrite.  The author abandoned  
> it and so did I.

Now that's a pity.

I've considered writing something like that, but it looks like PackEmIn beat
me to it, at least for Windows.  For IRIX, I already have DLT tapes bigger
than any disk drive on the machine, so there's no motivation there.  I
suppose I shouldn't mention that I've only written about 25 lines of code in
the last 18 months....

-Shel