"Nathan J. Williams" <nathanw@wasabisystems.com> writes:
> I've just started doing this myself. I'm using a NEC
> DVD+-R+-RW+DL+xyzzy... drive and DVD-R media; mkisofs plus growisofs

(xyzzy: Transport the disk to/from the burner to the dvd-cakebox in
one easy step???)

> seems to do the job. Speed isn't great, but probably isn't the
> tool's fault; I only achieved an average burning speed of about
> "2.5x" (~28Mbps) speed while burning, with the drive attached over
> USB2, so each burn took about 20 minutes.

I finally stopped doing direct fs->burner backups too and now do a
mkisofs fs->tmp.iso, and dvd+rw tmp.iso->burner.  The gathering of
data from various files (especially the small files like in
/usr/include) was too slow for full speed burner operation.  Grabbing
all the data from one huge file was quite a bit faster and was no
problem for burning at 8x DVD speed (~11MBytes/sec).  My burner can't
do 16x so I have no idea if my disks and fs would be able to reliably
stream 16x (22MByte/sec) data.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht                http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
      Microsoft Vista - because "Virus Installer" was too long.