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I was backing up our SVN repositories to DVD a while ago and wrote an entry on our wiki detailing how I’d done it. Thinking this is the kind of thing people will have to do at some point I thought it could be useful to share.

The method I’ve used is to create a single tar file of everything you’re looking to backup and then split that file into chunks which fit onto a single DVD.

Install GNU Core Utilities

Before we start, you’re going to need gsplit installed. This comes as part of the GNU Core Utilities package, so you can either download it from there or use your favourite package management software.

You can either build from source,

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.9.tar.gz
tar xzvf coreutils-6.9.tar.gz
cd coreutils-6.9
./configure
make && make install

Or use a package management tool like Homebrew.

brew install coreutils

Split your content into chunks

Put all the files you want to backup into one folder, create the tar achive and then split that into chunks.

mkdir archive
# … add some content to the archive/ folder …
cd archive
tar -cvf archive.tar *
gsplit -b4500m archive.tar

After you’ve burned each generated file to a DVD, delete both those and the source archive.tar file as they’ll be using quite a lot of space on your drive.

Restoring

Should the worst happen and you need to get your content back, copy all the files from across your DVDs to a folder on your machine and run the following.

cat x* > archive.tar
tar -xvf archive.tar