K3B and Backing-up /home dirs

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, here's the scenario. Whenever I hd install a new version of KNOPPIX, I invariably have filled-up my home dir with tons of stuff I need to backup. So I fire up K3B and drag my whole home dir to a data CD project about 500MB or 600MB in size and all is well.

Now, despite the fact that I tell anyone and everyone that will listen that "I don't do Windows!" everyone comes to me when they have a computer problem. And, yes, you guessed it, its always WimpDoze related....

Now my better half crashed her WIMxP install. So, I figure: fine, just backup everything in her "My Dox" to CD while I'm dual-booted in Linux. I have had no joy, however. I mounted hda1, I dragged her folder to a K3B data CD project, I started the burn. I tried this 5 times getting the equivalent of Linux Coasters each time as K3B bails out after a couple of minutes with some sort of IO error???

Am I missing something here. Anyone have a better suggestion for backing up her stuff (btw, no I can't ssh to another PC on the LAN as those hdds are full too and my ssh server at work is down, and my ftp server is full too - been there, done that too much already in previous backups)? Why do I have no problem backing up filess in /mnt/hda2/home/* but I do with /mnt/hda1/Documents....

Please help!

TIA,
AJG

[Cuddles]

Sorry, I dont have a "known" clue, or resolve, but, I do have three possible ideas / hypothesis on them:

( 1 ) is k3b dieing on a same file, or folder ( possibly corrupted ) -=- Can you "copy" the data to your own "native" Linux folder and use k3b on that ?
( 2 ) could your temp ( or tmp ) folders be overflowing. k3b could be dieing because of not having enough temp storage space to perform the task ?
( 3 ) when this happens, does dmesg report problems in the logs, or possibly with the drive, or in the system logs ?

I have used k3b, for data, and audio CD's, and sometimes its just "finicky". Most of the time, the first time I run it on a new system, it just locks up, or closes with a crash, but, after that, it seems to work just fine. I have found that k3b is not very tollerant of disk, or disc, errors, and will simply crash when it encounters a problem. Possibly use dd ?

Sorry I cant be of more help, I am only guessing here. I dont have any Windows installs, or drives, anymore, only Linux file systems. But, hopefully, I can give some assistance :)

Ms. Cuddles

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Thanx Cuddles, you just gave me an idea! I have room on my Linux partition on that machine to copy the folder in question over. Then maybe I could back it up to cd from there since I had no trouble backing up another large linux folder (my home dir).

If its just K3B that's buggy, can I just use cdrecord instead? If so, how?

I didn't check dmesg. If I have errors again, I'll check it and post here.

Thanx,
AJG

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, thanx Cuddles, that did the trick! I don't know why I couldn't backup the files directly from hda1, but as soon as I cp'ed them to my /home/dir I was able to back them up to CD.

Regards,
AJG