[lug] DVD Burner Recommendations

[Bear Giles]

Jeff Schroeder wrote:
> Lately I've seen CD burners for $20 at Office Depot and other fine 
> retailers, but I use mine for critical data backups and there's no way 
> I'd want to trust that function to a white-label brand (you mentioned 
> CompUSA, for example).

I would expect the media to be much more critical than the burner.
Cheap media might not last a year even if written by an excellent 
burner.

Meanwhile your backups can eliminate a lot of risk by generating 
an MD5SUMS file as the last step before calling mkisofs, then 
verifying it once the disk is burned.  It takes a few minutes, but 
eliminates nasty surprises.

The command to generate the file is to cd into the root of the 
image and run

  $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum |\
      sort --key=2 > MD5SUMS

to get a pretty list with sorted entries in each subdirectory.

Finally I've seen some really bad advice to do backups by running 
mkisofs on a live directory.  This is risky - the ISO9660 FS has a 
limited filename length and < 1024 entries per subdirectory, and a 
number of my directories violate both restrictions.  (Gotta love JFS!)

Bear