I have a small network with a central backup server; backup has been to hard drive, compressed.
I have begun experimenting with using dump(8) to split partitions in to manageable units for burning onto DVD+RW. I am posting to see if anyone else is using dump with optical media; I'm interested in finding out whether there is a better way than how I am currently accomplishing it. ----- I have been using ISO9660, and carving each DVD+RW disc into 2 logical dump volumes to get past ISO9660 filesize limitations. I've also been using a hard drive as temporary storage. And I have been using 32kb blocksizes, since that is what growisofs uses. For example: dump -0B 2294928 -b 32 -f file1,file2,file3,... /path/to/backups growisofs -Z /dev/rcd0c -r file1 file2 growisofs -Z /dev/rcd0c -r file3 file4 growisofs -Z /dev/rcd0c -r file5 ... I have yet to figure out how to burn dump volumes directly to the disc without a filesystem, and then *cleanly* restore. For example: dump -0B 4590208 -b 2 -f /dev/rcd0c /path/to/backups In addition, I have been forced to use hard drive as working space. I have not been able to get named pipes working with dump, and it will not split std output into volumes. Does anyone have a better way? -Josh-