Good tool for archiving to media?

[Jim Kuzdrall]

On Thursday 29 May 2008 12:55, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> I have a directory with a slew of files I'll probably not need again
> (a mirror of Fedora Legacy) and I'd like to burn them off to disc,
> probably so I can throw those discs out ten years from now unread. ;)
>
> Anyway, there are 42GB worth of files that I'd like to put on 4.7GB
> discs.  I'd like to find an automated app or set of scripts that
> will:
>
> * checksum the files (md5 or SHA type)
> * store a manifest of the directory structure and checksums, ideally
> on each disc (probably tunable)
> * store the files with reasonable compression (I'm willing to wait
> for bzip over gzip, e.g.)
> * optimize disc layout to maximize the number of files (% of used
> space) per disc, but maintaining as much coherency as possible, and
> splitting if really needed (probably tunable?)
> * allow for access into a single disc's content, randomly accessed
> would be ideal
> * store some forward error correction information to account for a
> small amount of bitrot (probably tunable)
> * free software
> * bonus points for doing mkisofs and/or cdrecord for me, but not
> really necessary
>
>  From what I can tell from its website, RAR does much of this but
> it's proprietary and patented and runs on Windows.  It seems like a
> common enough set of criteria that some combination of bzip, par,
> split, md5sum, and a handful of perl scripts could get this done.
> I'm guessing this wheel's been invented but I haven't found it yet.

    I had looked at KDE kdar (compatible with dar).  It has all the 
checksums, ability to specify which files get compressed, extract 
individual files rather than directory tree, optimally divide archive 
by disk size, make incremental backups, specify don't-archive on 
file-by-file basis, etc.  And, it can be used from the command line and 
accept scripts!

    Just a suggestion in case you hadn't run across it.

Jim Kuzdrall