On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 11:17:19AM +0200, Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I want to make backups to removable media on a machine without tape
> streamer.  Is it possible to dump(8) a filesystem directly[*] to
> (multiple) CD-ROMs?  
> 
> [*] without writing them to a file first and split(1)ing them manually.  
> 
> GH

I already found a partial solution, based on this tutorial: 
http://www.jochen-solbrig.de/freebsd/cdrom_backup.html

If I use dump(8) with "-C 700000" (the size of a CD-ROM in Kb) and "-f
dump.1,dump.2,dump.3,dump.4,dump.5", then it will (non-interactively!)
create the different volumes in the different files specified.  Now the
dumps still have to be written to disk first, but at least I have
volumes which restore(8) can understand, and the actual dump can run at
night, non-interactively.  I can then burn the CDs the next day.  

Also, on FreeBSD, multiple (small enough) volumes can be put on one CD,
and be restored again as different "tracks" of the cd (in FreeBSD these
device nodes are called /dev/acd0t1 through /dev/acd0t99), so the cd can
really be treated as a tape with different dump volumes on it.  I don't
know whether this is possible in NetBSD though, it doesn't seem to have
such "per track" device nodes.  

GH

-- 
:wq