multicd Frequently Asked Questions

Why can't I mount the CDs created by multicd?

By default, multicd creates ext2 filesystems on the CDs it creates. Most people have entries in their /etc/fstab files that assume you will be mounting CDs with ISO9660 filesystems. To mount your backup CDs, use this command:

    mount -r -t ext2 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

How do I mount disc image files?

    mount -t ext2 -oloop /root/multicd_image1 /mnt/tmp

Can I create ISO9660 backup CDs with multicd?

A few people have asked about this. Here's an excerpt from an email I sent to one person:

I haven't been working on ISO9660 support. I ran into problems when I tried to implement it. multicd copies files to the filesystem to be burned to a CD one at a time until it receives a "disk full" error, and then it knows that it's time to move on to the next CD. The problem with ISO9660 filesystems is that they are read-only. You can't add or remove files from an existing filesystem. Also, given a group of files, I don't know how to predict the *exact* size of the ISO9660 filesystem that would be required to hold those files. The size of the filesystem image would be a little larger than the combined size of the files, but I don't know exactly how much larger.

Can I use patterns or regular expressions to select which files to include with the files option or exclude with the exclude option?

multicd does not support this internally, however you can use the command line to achieve what you want here. For example, this uses the shell to expand wildcards:

    multicd --exclude /*/tmp --files /home/*/Mail

You could even write your own script that generates a list of the directories and files that you want to backup, and then call it from the command line like this:

    multicd --files $(get_filenames)

The $() runs a program and then returns its output to the command line. The sample get_filenames program shown here could be designed by its author to backup files based on file name patterns, or dates, or whatever.