Re: Making a file image with compression

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Jack Dodds wrote:
> I'm using Debian Stable (Buster) which has xorriso version
> 1.5.0.

Should be otherwise ok, unless you try -stream_recording with a
MATSHITA laptop DVD drive.

All other known bugs of 1.5.0 happen only under exotic circumstances,
except the mentioned bug about zisofs and substantial continuation
area usage.


> So I will watch for 1.5.4 in Unstable and install it as soon as I can.

I was told by my sponsor that it will have to wait in "experimental"
for the end of the release freeze, once i have prepared the new packages
of libburn, libisofs, and libisoburn on
  https://salsa.debian.org/optical-media-team
(I must update my Sid VM after more than a year of inactivity. This
might become interesting.)

You could use GNU xorriso meanwhile. It does not interfere with the
installed Debian packages, unless you do a full "make install".
You'd need packages "build-essential", "zlib1g-dev", "libacl1-dev",
"libattr1-dev" and the xorriso-1.5.4.pl02.tar.gz tarball.
Ask for more instructions if you want to go that way.
It's not harder than composing the arguments of a xorriso run. :))


> I've been using Blu-Ray disks for backup and the ISO images are
> now too big for even a BD-DL. Hopefully the compression will let
> me get another year out of the existing setup. Then it will be
> time for BD-XL!

I am too thrifty for multi-layer BD. The 25 GB media are nicely cheap
now.
The directory names "Downloads" and "Music" might indicate that your
data are already mostly compressed.

The problem of backups too large for a single 650 MB CD led me to
developing multi-volume backup software about 20 years ago.
  http://scdbackup.webframe.org/main_eng.html
The installation is a bit peculiar. Per-user with a small installation
job for the superuser. You'd need package "build-essential".
See

  http://scdbackup.webframe.org/examples.html

BD is covered by the "sdvdbackup*" commands with an appropriate size
option like
  -max_size 23090m
I.e. you'd need to run ./CONFIGURE_DVD .

Inquire the actual BD medium size by
  xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -list_formats | fgrep 'Format status:'
Like
  Format status: formatted, with 23098.0 MiB
Subtract a few MiB, just to be on the safe side.

I still use it every other day for incremental backups, mainly with
DVD+RW and BD-RE. The level 0 base backups fill cake boxes of BD-R.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas