[wplug] Online Backup

[Bill Moran]

Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>
> Zach wrote:
> > On 10/12/07, Teodorski, Chris <teodorski at ppg.com> wrote:
> >> CD's sure, but what is the shelf life of a burned CD (maybe 5 years
> > at best) and I
> >> hear the same is true for DVDs.  I wonder how many parents are unaware that a
> >> burned CD isn't like a "pressed" CD and 7 years from now when they go
> > to look at
> >> the photos of their little bundles of joy are going to be shocked to
> > discover some
> >> or all are unreadable.
> > 
> > Wow I didn't realize this! So all my data CD's will be gone in 5
> > years?! UGH NOOOOO!
> > How can I backup my data so it will be around for a long time? I don't
> > mean online backup, I need something I can do myself at home.
> 
> Just to clarify, it doesn't 100% mean that all of your data will be gone
> in 5 years.  Back in 1996 I spent way too much money as a high school
> student to buy a CD Burner.  I still have some of the first CDs I burned
> using that machine (when a blank CD would cost about $15-$20 and you
> needed to ask at the special service desk at CompUSA for them), and my
> testing shows 10 out of 10 just fine.  Well, as in I could pull up, do
> an ls, and poke at a few other files.

This is killing me ... I've been trying to remember the name of this
software for weeks.

There's a spiffy little POSIX program out there that you can feed a file
and it will break it into chunks with parity.

The concept is that you take all your important data, tar it up into a
single file.  Let's say the total file is 2G, which is too big for a
single CD.  Then, you feed it into this program and give the program
the switches to tell it max file size of 650M and 2 parity files.  The
program creates 5 files of about 650M in size, so you can burn 5 CDs.
The beauty is that since you created 2 parity files, you can lose up
to 2 CDs and your data is still recoverable, much like a RAID 5 or
RAID 6.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the software, and I've
been unable to formulate a Google search that finds it ...

Anyone know the program I'm thinking of?

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com