DVD-Ram with Ubuntu Hardy is easy to handle

Hi, some days ago I decided to do another big backup of my project files so I thought about a good solution that’s not that expensive and I ended up with dvd-ram type4 (cartridge but removable).

I bought 5 double sided dvd-ram 3x speed from Verbatim (4.7GiB each side) and it’s important to choose the 3x speed because they are more robust and they aren’t really slow. I haven’t done any speedtests yet but my backups felt much faster than on my new usb stick.

If you are working with Ubunty Hardy install “libudf”, “libudf-dev” and “udftools”. What I then did was simply putting in the dvd-ram in to my LG dvd-ram drive and watching the window popping up ready for files to be dragged on it :). There are probably other requirements to get this working but I can’t tell you what was installed in the past when I installed other apps so use that with care.

The drive is also spinning down after a while if you aren’t copying files to it. That’s really cool.

And please don’t even try to install “kdvd-ram”. The name promises a lot and the author might know a lot about dvd-ram and how to handle it on linux based machines but he doesn’t really know how to create software that works. This is just a tiny complaint about software that I never wanted install after I found out how bad it really is. Sorry @author. Nobody is perfect :).

On my main workstation (is it still my main workstation :P?) where Slackware is still running I haven’t done any dvd-ram tests so I can’t tell you how to set it up there but I think it’s going to its retirement.

Ubuntu Hardy really was a big step forward to a better distribution. I’m satisfied and I was a slackware user for several years and I was always happy and I also tried all versions of Ubuntu but they all were too buggy for me but Hardy is great.

However, DVD-ram is an option when it comes to backups.

Kind regards,

Andreas.