Subject: Suggestion for CD filesystem for Backups

You can use CDs or DVDs for Backup purposes. They do error correction,
everything is fine, until the errors get too much, than everything is
lost. This is a nuisance for a backup, especially because normal people
don't have the hardware to measure errors, jitter and the like.

Suggestion:
Why not write a file system on top of ISO9660 which uses the rest of the
CD to write error correction. If a sector becomes unreadable, the error
correction saves the data. Besides, a tool for testing the error rate
and the safety of the data can be easily written for a normal CD-ROM drive.

The data for error correction might be written into a file so that the
CD can be read using any System, but Linux provides error correction.

Mirko Kloppstech


2004-09-23 17:22:46

by Alan

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Suggestion for CD filesystem for Backups

On Iau, 2004-09-23 at 00:04, Judith und Mirko Kloppstech wrote:
> Why not write a file system on top of ISO9660 which uses the rest of the
> CD to write error correction. If a sector becomes unreadable, the error
> correction saves the data. Besides, a tool for testing the error rate
> and the safety of the data can be easily written for a normal CD-ROM drive.
>
> The data for error correction might be written into a file so that the
> CD can be read using any System, but Linux provides error correction.

Send patches, or possibly if you are dumping tars and the like just
write yourself an app to generate a second file of ECC data.

2004-09-23 18:40:56

by Erik Hanson

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Suggestion for CD filesystem for Backups

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:04:00 +0200, Judith und Mirko Kloppstech
<[email protected]> wrote:
> The data for error correction might be written into a file so that the
> CD can be read using any System, but Linux provides error correction.

You may want to look at parchive, if you havn't already. It does this, is cross-
platform and is in wide use. http://parchive.sourceforge.net/

2005-02-07 16:45:40

by Ali Bayazit

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Suggestion for CD filesystem for Backups


On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 17:16 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Iau, 2004-09-23 at 00:04, Judith und Mirko Kloppstech wrote:
> > Why not write a file system on top of ISO9660 which uses the rest of the
> > CD to write error correction. If a sector becomes unreadable, the error
> > correction saves the data. Besides, a tool for testing the error rate
> > and the safety of the data can be easily written for a normal CD-ROM drive.
> >
> > The data for error correction might be written into a file so that the
> > CD can be read using any System, but Linux provides error correction.
>
> Send patches, or possibly if you are dumping tars and the like just
> write yourself an app to generate a second file of ECC data.
>
Wouldn't it be safer to do ECC on meta-data also?
That probably means replacing ISO9660 though.

-ali

--
Ali Bayazit <[email protected]>

2005-02-07 22:54:11

by Toon van der Pas

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Suggestion for CD filesystem for Backups

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 01:18:19AM -0400, Ali Bayazit wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 17:16 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Iau, 2004-09-23 at 00:04, Judith und Mirko Kloppstech wrote:
> > > Why not write a file system on top of ISO9660 which uses the rest of the
> > > CD to write error correction. If a sector becomes unreadable, the error
> > > correction saves the data. Besides, a tool for testing the error rate
> > > and the safety of the data can be easily written for a normal CD-ROM drive.
> > >
> > > The data for error correction might be written into a file so that the
> > > CD can be read using any System, but Linux provides error correction.
> >
> > Send patches, or possibly if you are dumping tars and the like just
> > write yourself an app to generate a second file of ECC data.
>
> Wouldn't it be safer to do ECC on meta-data also?
> That probably means replacing ISO9660 though.

There seems to be a good user space alternative for this purpose:

http://dvdisaster.berlios.de

Regards,
Toon.
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan