Multi-DVD backups using zero disk space

As a few million other people, I have started doing my backups on DVD+RW. With a capacity of 4.7GB (that's 4.7 billion bytes, not 4.7 * 2^20 bytes), fast write speeds (compared to CD-RW) and the ability to reuse the media thousands of times, it's hard to ask for more.

Unfortunately the problem when backing up to DVD starts when you have to choose a format. You could theoretically use any default filesystem that your OS likes and burn that directly to the media, but it would be highly incompatible with any other OS. One of the desired characteristics of a backup is the ability to restore easily under any circumstance (or any OS).

That basically leaves us with ISO-9660 as a format. Virtually every OS supports that. Of course there's your Rock Ridge extensions for Unix, and your Joliet for Windows, but that's easy to implement (most software supports both). The problem is, even with these extension, the ISO-9660 format is pretty limited. It needs a lot of hand-holding in order to solve duplicate filenames (inside different directories, which is quite common in any filesystem), and the most common utility to generate such a filesystem (mkisofs) tends to require _a lot_ of switches to do what you want.

OK, so all we have to do is come up with a script to feed mkisofs with the proper switches, resolve the duplicate filenames, and we're set, right? Not quite.

Making an ISO-9660 image of your data and then burning it would require lots of temporary storage. At least the 4.7GB to be exact. And in lots of situations, that temporary space just won't be available, or your /tmp or /home partitions may be too full to fit that image in. That's why we need to backup in lots of situations--to free up some space. How can you free space up when you need _more_ space to do it? Sounds like asking a bank manager for a loan--he'll want you to prove that you already have the money in order to lend it to you!

Back to software land, we'll need a neat utility called growisofs. It is named like that for historical reasons, but can actually burn the DVD for you, as well as making the ISO-9660 filesystem. The strategy here will be to identify the files that we're backing up, and group them until we reach the media size, then provide that list of files to growisofs so that it can make the filesystem and burn it on the fly, without using temporary storage :)

Another alternative would be to use the mkisofs -stream-media-size switch, but that way we could end up splitting up a file (I think--I didn't actually test this), which is not at least what I personally want with my backups. Notice that my technique here can waste a lot of space if you have lots of huge files, and won't even work at all if you have files larger than 4.7GB. I use this script to backup my pictures, music, and data. For movies and other large files I create a directory, move files to fit nicely inside the 4.7GB, and then backup "." (the current directory) using the same script. Works quite nicely.

Please also note that this script is not for production purposes. It's a hack that I came up with to do simple yet effective backups to DVD. Again, works fine for me. YMMV.

And finally for the script itself. You can find it here. It takes only 2 command line parameters: the volume label prefix, and the directory to backup. The volume label of your burned DVDs will be the prefix appended with "_01", "_02" and so on. There's a bug where when the backup is finished it'll still ask you for one more DVD. Just press Enter and it will quit harmlessly (without turning your DVD into a coaster ;)).