Using the DVD Burner

There is a DVD burner on Kani (the crab). It accepts DVD+R or DVD-R, although the instructions below are for DVD+R, and it hasn't been tested with DVD-R.

To use it, put a blank DVD in the drive, open a terminal window, and run the "burndvd" program. Its usage is:

burndvd dir …

That is, you give it a list of directories. These can be on Tako (the RAID server), or local. So for example,

burndvd /tako_data3/coppola/20051011

This will check to make sure that the directory's contents do not exceed 4.7 GB, and if not, it will produce a listing of what the top level of the DVD will look like, and say:

Press enter to create this DVD or ^C to abort:

An important thing to remember is that the DVD will contain the contents of the directories mentioned on the command line, not the directories themselves. So in the above example there won't be a "20051011" directory, only the contents of that directory.

If you want to put two or more of the "datestamp" directories on the DVD, you need to make a set of links, usually something like this:

mkdir tmp
ln -s /tako_data3/<user>/<datestamp> tmp
…
burndvd tmp