Backing up to DVD?

[thesun]

I am looking to upgrade to Fedora 8 and am wanting to make 2 backup copies of my home directory. They don't actually have to be exact mirrors or anything, but I need to make sure all my photos, emails, settings, etc. get retained. Is there any easy way to divide up the contents of my directory into 4.7GB chunks so they can be sequentially burned to DVD until the whole directory is backed up?

I have an additional wrinkle in that I am almost at full capacity for my drive, meaning I need to make _one_ 4.7GB file at a time (if possible) rather than make 80 of them and fill up the remaining space on my drive.

I'm open to any suggestions (i.e. "Get yourself that 1.5TB USB drive you've always wanted and go to town") but would also love to know if there are any good ways to do this. I've tried using K3B to drag and drop smaller directory contents and do it that way, but it's near impossible for a huge home directory with thousands of different files.

I'm guessing this is a pretty basic concept but whenever I try searching it returns things for copying DVDs and so on...here I need to backup _to_ a DVD rather than the other way around. :-)

[InfRecursion]

tarlimit -jz --verbose=2 --max-gigabyte=4.7 /home/USERID

You can find tarlimit here:
http://tarlimit.sourceforge.net/

This will create compressed tars of your home directory, when 4.7GB is reached, it starts a new tar file. I recently did this and it worked great.

Then you could use cdrecord to burn that file to a dvd, or you could create an iso, etc.

[thesun]

This look really promising. Thanks for the suggestion. Do you know a way I can pause it midway though, so that I can burn one tarfile and delete it to make room on the hard disk for the next?

[Dangermouse]

There is a program in the repos specially for backing up home dir etc

su
yum install pybackpack

[InfRecursion]

@thesun: I just found it two days ago... the readme file has a few options, not sure if you can pause or not though.

[thesun]

Looks like the --pause option is exactly what the doctor ordered. :-) I'm also going to check out the new pybackpack post. Sounds promising.