Entries this day: Today

Today

12:19pm JST Sunday 01 May 2005

After work yesterday I wondered if Hitomi left her computer so I could write some files to DVD. My computer can't write DVD, but can read them. She did, so I copied all my files to her computer.. well, all my images and music and non porn movies and the contents of my desktop to her computer. I must give props to Mac for making this super easy. I used a straight cable (not crossover) to connect the machines directly and it worked easily, just by turning on Sharing on Hitomi's computer. I turned off her airport card so no one could access her machine wirelessly while sharing was enabled.

She bought Roxio Toast, which makes burning CDs and DVDs a snap. Somethng that Panther (OS X 10.3) can't do with Finder, but apparently Tiger (OS X 10.4) will be able to do. I might get Tiger, but I may wait until I get a new machine. Hopefully that won't be for a while. I'm interested to know what jungle cat will be next. I can't think of any more such names that end with R, discounting jaguar, which was the first version? 10.2? I don't know if 10.1 had a cat name.

ANYWAY, the pics directory was 5 gigs, and the music directory was 5 gigs and I couldn't think of a logical way to split them. So I just tarred all four directories into a tarball using -L to limit the size f the archive. I used google to determine how many kilobytes in 4.7 gigabytes, but tarballs that big were too big. 4.4 gigs of writable space on the DVDs. I tried again, but was over by like 4 k. Tried again and got it just the right size for the DVDs. burned 3 DVDs overnight.

tar --create -L 4596699 --file rob_arc_2005apr30.tar rob

rob is the directory where all my files were.

Actually I burned the first two volumes then realized her HD ran out of space during the burn of the third, but tar didn't report an error; it just finished the file with 52K remaining on her HD and waited for me to clear space for the next one.

I had burned the first two .tar files, but wasn't going to waste space burning the third; it was only 2 something gigs.

So I wiped all the .tar files from the HD and recreated them, and had at most two at a time on the drive. Toast writing one to DVD and tar creating the next.

I burned all three DVDs that way, and wondered if the two copies of the first volume of the archive was the same on each copy of DVD 1 and DVD 2. Wiped all the files from the HD then copied 1 from the DVD and used diff to compare it to the next DVD. Both copies were exactly the same. Awesome. Thank you, tar. Thank you, Toast.

That basically took all night and this morning as I was leaving for OM, I was neeeearly finished copying the third DVD to make a duplicate of it as well. I left Hitomi's computer running while I'm at work (and probably while I meet Satoko tonight).

The next step is to use tar to test extraction of the files. I was hoping to do that today while at work, but it will have to wait until tonight.