Mike’s Place

We all know it: nobody does backups. At least, most people don’t, anyway.

But everyone—and probably you, too—has important data.

What to do? If you’re on something other than Windows (or you’re using Cygwin on Windows) and you don’t mind a little bit of copy & paste, there is an easy answer here.

Check out xorriso

The xorriso command makes this easy. Well, “easy”, meaning once you have learned how, you can put it in a shell script and life is happy.

The xorriso man page has an example, which I’ve adjusted very slightly, that is useful for this task:

xorriso --abort-on FATAL --for_backup --disk_dev_ino on \
    --dev /dev/sr0 --volid ${NAME}_$(date +'%Y%m%d%H%M%S') \
    --update_r . / \
    --commit --toc --check_md5 FAILURE -- --eject all

So, what does it do? In a nutshell, it places the current directory onto the medium. If the medium is empty, then it does the whole thing. If you’ve done this once (or more) before, xorriso will perform a comparison of the current state of the media and burn a new session with a new TOC showing the updated state. Old files that are not modified are not re-written to the media, meaning that each new session only requires space for the session itself and the differences between it and the previous one.

You can have a shell script such that all of your important directories are incrementally backed up.

Additional bonus: Reading the most recent version of the files burned to the media is as easy as popping it in the drive and using the file manager of your choice on any operating system—including Windows.

Previous versions, well, that’s for another time. It suffices to say that the previous versions still exist on the media, and the data (and TOC) present within those sessions can still be read.