Quote:
Originally Posted by shep
I also use the tar command but add the compression flag for gzip. Given that your /home directory is about 5GB, compression might be enough to get it all on one DVD.
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Compression can be dangerous. In some compression formats corruption of one byte can lead to unability of decompression of whole archive. Probably some modification to decompression algorithms would allow to recover at least some data, but they are not currently able to do that. I can confirm that on xz archives.
You can counter that using tools like "par2cmdline", but they add redundancy making files larger. Some file formats are compressable to pretty good degree for example text files. For text files compression and later adding redundancy can make resulting archive smaller overall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shep
As far as the durability of DVD disks, I read somewhere, that standard disks could be relied on for about 10 years. I believe that there are some newer DVD touting more durable data storage but not sure sure that the improved durability is anything more than hype.
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I don't think that there are large investments in DVD storage nowadays. I wouldn't count on today discs and DVD recorders being more reliable that its 10 years old counterparts.
If you have DVD recorder in your non-budget desktop's system unit from 2008 I would prefer that recorder than today recorders.
Record DVD at medium speed for improved durability. There were tests that showed low speed and maximum speed recording are making more writing errors than medium speed recording.