[tech] Burner vs. Diablo 2 (Re: [ucc] AGM Minutes)

[David Manchester]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 09:40:04PM +0800, Nick Bannon wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > > Don't quite understand, surely you mostly only want the iso9660 and 
> > > your native filesystem? About the only thing I'd want to read in 
> > > from local media is old Amiga floppy disks, and Linux on x86 can't 
> > > read those!
> > 
> > Me neither. I only burn ISO9660 CDs Nick ....
> 
> Just to be clear - I'm all in favour of sticking the burner on a decent
> workstation that's not going to keep getting rebooted into a single
> user OS.
> 
> However, Linux (tsk) on PC hardware (tsk) does have some advantages and
> if we just go and plug the burner straight into mola, we're going to
> have a crap solution and someone's just going end up plugging it back
> into a useful machine or doing without.
> 
> It needs:
>  * Fast ethernet
>  * At least a couple of gigs of spare disc to play in
> 
> (If it had additional temporary space > morwong's largest partition
>  (a mere 9GB) I hereby promise to write some backup scripts using it.
>  Attaching [SAF]'s DLT to it on occasion would be even better.)

A couple of points before you get too excited about Simon's DLT:

What does does it need fast ethernet for?
You're not burning over the wire... the burner's only 4x.

Why does it need so much disk?
If you're backing up home directories, no-one's going to have much
over 650MB, so where is the 9GB needed?

The DDS-2 drive on morwong works.
If you need to back things up in chunks larger than one CD, 
then use the 4mm drive. DDS-2 tapes are craploads cheaper than DLTs.

Simon might remain in the UK.
I expect the DLT will go with him if he returns to collect his 
belongings.

> Linux also has advantages that it shares to a greater or lesser extent
> with other *nix'es - notably doing flexible things with filesystems.
> Sure it'll read Amiga disc images (though for actual floppies you'll
> need Amiga floppy hardware as well, but of course you knew that). I've
> found it very handy to be able to mount a 40GB ReiserFS partition on an
> IDE disc in a hard disc cradle and burn ready-made images straight off
> it.  I've found it handy to be able to process and loopback mount large
> (eg 6GB and 20GB) disc images. It can make use of Joliet CDs. Given a
> decent network, though, none of that should be vital.

I can't see how -any- of that makes a dedicated non-linux machine
less useful for home directory backups.

> [...]
> > What's CD-RW got to do with it? a CD-R blank is like $0.75 ...
> 
> True, but not from the UCC vending machine. Still grates a bit to throw
> one away every month, when a CD-RW is now $1. Anyway, as Grahame said,
> at the time we got the drive that we had a sensible quote for.

Grates? At $12.00/year?
Why bother backing up at all if your data isn't worth that much?

D.
-- 
" I don't get mad.... I get stabby. "
- William "Fat Tony" Williams.