#1205 optical backup solution

[Jim Michaels]

see ticket #1204.
this would entail adding cdrtools to the program if possible, or some sort of disc burning application.
there could be 2 modes:

• create all the ISOs at once like in ticket #1204.
• after creating an ISO, wait for disc to be removed, and blank disc of proper size to be inserted the guy at cdrtfe may be able to help you with that since cdrtools generates different dumps depending on type of media and media content, and there are certain things to scan for and numbers to extract and convert.
• support for disc auto-changers (optical archivers): see what operaions are available for various models. allow for "parallel"-burn. actually, in a case like this, chances are your backup is going to be serial anyway, you just have to change discs less often. for example, if you have 4 drives in your auto-changer, drive 1 gets written and changed, then drive 2 gets written and changed, then drive 3 gets written and changed, then drive 4 gets written and changed, then drive 1... you should always check that you actually have media after a change (I think that's how it works, maybe it's possible to check the supply first?). these are usually blu-ray drives. there should be a choice to choose only 1 of the drives (should be the default) to work with since this will usually be a serial operation, this way, other folks doing backups will have a chance to also do backups on another allocated drive. for single-drive-selection, the program should detect that either a drive has been allocated or is busy and know how many are in the auto-changer. maybe that is a network or server thing. maybe that info is built into the changer's drivers.

non-blu-ray optical discs use 2048-byte sectors to my knowledge, blu-ray uses 65536-byte clusters, so the size numbers you get should be multiplied by that.
see http://jesusnjim.com/using-computers/optical-drives/media-capacities.html

[Jim Michaels]

never mind, whole thing is a bad idea.