[CentOS] Multiple incremental DVD backup program?

[Keith Roberts]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2012, Les Mikesell wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Multiple incremental DVD backup program?
> 
> On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Just a knee-jerk reaction because I like it so well, but whenever
>>> anyone mentions backups I have to recommend backuppc.   If you have
>>> any other system that can work over the network (perhaps offsite via
>>> VPN) and hold copies on-line you might like it.  It is the kind of
>>> thing that you can set up once and it will take care of itself for
>>> years.   It can use rsync for the transport so after your initial copy
>>> you only need bandwidth for the changes.
>>
>> That's something I might take a look at. What I want
>> to do is make backups that are on removable media, so they
>> are not dependant on a machine for their data safety. Once I
>> have burnt the backups to DVD they will be stored away then,
>> just in case I need them.
>>
>
> Backuppc has an option to do something like that out of the backup
> copies (extract the equivalent of a tar, compressed and split to files
> that will fit on your backup media) but it is sort of an afterthought.
> The real focus is on keeping a history of backups online stored in a
> very efficient form so you can keep much more than you would expect
> online and available in a given amount of disk space.   It is much
> easier to use its web interface  to pick a file from last month to
> restore than to have to extract it from some huge old tar files on
> dvds.

Thanks for your helpful replies Les and others.

I've dealt with the directory size issues by using

$ du -sch DirName

to give a listing for the size of all the subdirectories and 
files in DirName directory.

To split the files under DirName i created 2 subdirs called

xxx_DVD-1
xxx_DVD-2

and just moved stuff to each subdirectory using F6 key in 
mc. Then ran du -sch on each of the DVD-1 and DVD-2 sub dirs.

I don't really want to compress things anyway. So that's the 
file and directory sizes sorted.

My only problem now is because some files were created on 
different OS's, such as Win 32 and possibly Mac OS(X) K3b 
complains that the character set encoding for the filenames 
is wrong, and will not create the iso image for me.

So I done some Googling and found this posting:

International Chars cause backup problems
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-98363.html

Then I installed convmv and read the docs on that.

I'm still not sure how to identify out of 4.3G what 
character encodings are used for certain files.

Is there any way to grep for a listing of these character 
encodings, so I can tell convmv what sets I want to convert 
into utf8 please?

Kind Regards,

Keith Roberts

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