backing up usenet binaries

Mr. Pointy · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 May 2002 Posts: 77

I'd like to make backups of rar files I've downloaded from binary newsgroups. All the rars for a typical hour long SVCD are about 800MBs.
These can be un-rared into an .mpg, run through vcdimager then burned as an SVCD with cdrdao. But, like I said, I'd like to keep the original rars as backups.
I've tried xcdroast. I wrote an image to harddisk then wrote it cd but it was too big. I think I might have read that xcdroast doesn't do dao mode which is what I think I need.

So, what I'm wondering is what tools would you use to do this? Is it possible to fit all this on one cd? ( they fit after being un-rared).
More generically, if you wanted to burn 800MBs of stuff to a cd what would you do?
Thanks

garo · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 9:52 am Post subject:

I would use 2 cd's !

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I was just looking at xcdroast yesterday, and I thought I saw a 'default' mode set to DAO. I could be mistaken. I'm more likely to thing the files are too big. Some newer drives support 800MB+ media.
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thegarbageman · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 3:59 pm Post subject:

I don't think DAO mode is going to help you any. (Although DAO is great for removing the 2 second gap between tracks for audio CDs)

I would use a file splitter/joiner such as lxsplit and use 2 CDs.

Also, you may get better compression with tar/bz2, instead of rar.

Home that helps!

phong · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 5:39 pm Post subject:

Actually, it doesn't make much sense to rar, gzip, zip or bzip mpeg files - they're already compressed and running them through another compresser usually won't buy enough to make up for the overhead/inconvienience. If you want to take advantage of the CRC abilities of one of those formats, making md5 signatures or something would work as well.
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Selkie · n00b Joined: 15 Jul 2002 Posts: 27

In Usenet the files are "rar-ed" not for compression but for the splitting. Lost Files are very common there, and if you loose a 15 rar file its more easy to repost it than to repost the entire ... linux iso *cough*

@Mr. Pointy: i had the same problem, i fear there is no solution without, for example, a DVD Burner (<- really cool, and not soooo expensive anymore)

cesman · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2002 Posts: 24

If you unrar the file(s) and created a SVCD, you already have a backup(unless you deleted the rar(s) after you unrared them.). Think of the SVCD as your originals then keep the rars on your hard drive as the backup. :wink:

Senor-D · n00b Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 14

The reason you're unable to fit those rars on one CD, but you can fit the SVCD data onto one CD, is error correction. SVCD-format CDs use less error correction than data cds, so they can fit more data. This keeps the CD-per-movie number lower, and is altogether a Good Thing. It's best to just use the SVCD itself as a backup, and possibly burn 2 copies. If you need to post to usenet, you're better off RARing and PARing it again and releasing it as a repack.
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