--On Wednesday, June 23, 2004 13:56:27 -0400 Gene Heskett <gene.heskett AT 
verizon DOT net> wrote:

> Greetings all;
> 
> I'm back from a week out in Nebraska, getting a son married off.  I 
> hope that you didn't get too many bounces as my mailbox was full when 
> I got X running again, which had died due to my changing the default 
> prompt in bash, which in turn screwed up the X startup, it would get 
> to the mouse intialization, report success in the log, but hang at 
> that point with no further disk activity.
> 
> Anyway, on arrival here, it appears my 2nd tape drive in as many 
> months is in the process of dying.
> 
> I recently bought a DVD+-RW, drive and a 25 pack of +- media.
> 
> While its burnt several cdr's just fine, the media I have appear to 
> not be compatible with cdrecord unless I buy the cdrecord-DVDPro 
> version from Jeorg.  I probably can, the $ is not a huge problem.
> 
> What I'd like from this group is some pointers on setting up the use 
> of this dvd drive as a 4.7GB tape equivalent.  I'd be glad to be 
> somebodies "guinea pig" :-)

Be sure to verify what you burn.  My experience in burning data DVDs
is limited to a set of 26 DVDs I made to move 120+GB of data between
locations (a high latency high bandwith data transfer). Of the 26
discs, 22 were read just fine, the other 4 had read errors on parts
of the discs.  If I skipped  over the file(s) involved I could read
the remainder of the disc, but each one of those bad discs had 10s of
MBs of unrecoverable data,  Fortunately I was able to rsync from the
original server to complete the data transfer, but that wouldn't have
been possible if I had needed to do a recover from those DVDs.
   I don't know if it was bad media or a buffer underrun while burning,
but the original burns completed without any indication of problems
(xcdroast with cdrecord).  YMMV, but I would be sure to do extensive
testing before relying on it for backups.  With video, minor data loss
just results in barely noticable dropped frames or nois, but with
data it can be catastophic. I would suggest running amverify on every
run, at least until you build some confidence in your burning.

My $.02,
Frank

> 
> -- 
> Cheers, Gene
> There are 4 boxes to be used in defense of liberty.  Soap, ballot, 
> jury, and ammo.
>  Please use in that order, starting now.  -Ed Howdershelt, Author
> Additions to this message made by Gene Heskett are Copyright 2004, 
> Maurice E. Heskett,
> all rights
> reserved.



-- 
Frank Smith                                      fsmith AT hoovers DOT com
Sr. Systems Administrator                       Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                   Fax: 512-374-4501