Free disk drives software for linux

Bontmia was written by John Enok Vollestad in april 2003 to merge the functionality of glastree and rsync in one application with a more flexible selection of long term storage. It has later gone through some changes to enhance usability
Main features:
Cost
- Tapes cost more than disks and require a tape-drive and possibly also a tape robot.
Reliability
- Disks have a higher MTBF than tapes and they require a tape drive of the same type. Disks can increase MTBF by being connected together to form RAID. Tapes can not. Incremental backup on a disk or a RAID volume does not change the MTBF while incremental backup on tape drastically lower the MTBF. Sometimes tapes written in one drive is difficult to read in another drive. This is a silent error if you do not test the tapes no and then. No such thing on file systems like ReiserFS.
Location
- Tapes is removable media and thereby avoiding the risk of localized disasters. A network connection does the same.
Time
- Copying just the changes gives a fast and efficient backup. Tape drives are very slow. Often slower than the network. Remote backup will therefore usually go faster to disk. Faster backup and efficient storage means one can do backup more often. Once every hour is usually not a problem. This also means rapid restore which is even more important.
Space
- Tapes split the data needlessly since they can not be used with RAID to form bigger volumes as disks can. Using hard-links on a file system gives very good storage efficiency and availability as ordinary file systems with random access.
- There is a lot of remote backup software out there. I wrote Bontmia since I could not find one that did all that I wanted.
Bontmia Functionality
- Each backup is a complete "snapshot" of the backed up directories.
- Files that is not changed since the last backup does not take up extra space and is not transferred over the network.
- Preserves a configurable selection of backups in a similar manner as tape rotation schemes.
- Remote backup is done encrypted over ssh for security reasons.
- Each backup is stored with absolute path.
- It is possible to limit the bandwidth to avoid affecting production systems.
- Support copying files, directories, device files, named pipes, symlinks and hard-links.
- Preserves user id, group id and permissions for all types of files.
Enhancements:
- Added support for specifying the directory for temporary files.

Mounttero automatically mounts most storage devices such as USB drives and cameras, DVDs, CDROMs, hard disks, and floppies.

Devices are mounted when users opens their directory, such as /mnt/auto/cdrom, and are unmounted when the directory remains unused for four seconds.

Usage

For example, when user opens directory /mnt/auto/usb/, digital camera is automatically mounted and all the pictures shown in the directory. After four seconds of inactivity, device is unmounted and can be detached.

Manual Configuration

The rest of this document describes manual configuration of mounttero. If you installed the rpm, it did all this configuration automatically and you dont need manual configuration. The scripts below contain some latest and greatest version 0.5 improvements that have not made it to rpm yet, namely more usb partitions.

Create the directories used by the automounter. The directory is the one mentioned in /etc/auto.master:

# mkdir -p /mnt/auto/autofs

Create auto.master to tell autofs daemon that /mnt/auto/autofs directory is handled according to auto.tero

# /etc/auto.master
# mountpoint map options # see also: man 8 autofs
/mnt/auto/autofs /etc/auto.tero --timeout=4

List the actual mountpoints and devices in the automounter map

# /etc/auto.tero
# http://iki.fi/karvinen/linux/doc/automatic-mounting-autofs.html
# mountpoint_key options location_device # man 5 autofs
cdrom -fstype=auto,ro,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/cdrom
cdrom1 -fstype=auto,ro,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/cdrom1
usb -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,noexec,user,gid=100,umask=000 :/dev/sda1
# second and third partitions in usb device:
usb2 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,noexec,user,gid=100,umask=000 :dev/sda2
usb3 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,noexec,user,gid=100,umask=000 :dev/sda3
floppy -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,noexec,user,gid=100,umask=000 :/dev/fd0

hda1 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hda1
hda2 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hda2
hda3 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hda3
hda4 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hda4

hdb1 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdb1
hdb2 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdb2
hdb3 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdb3
hdb4 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdb4

hdc1 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdc1
hdc2 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdc2
hdc3 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdc3
hdc4 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdc4

hdd1 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdd1
hdd2 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdd2
hdd3 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdd3
hdd4 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hdd4

# Serial ATA (SATA) disks are IDE emulated in Linux 2.6
hde1 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hde1
hde2 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hde2
hde3 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hde3
hde4 -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,user :/dev/hde4

# (c) 2003, 2004-05-29, 2004-09-19 Tero.Karvinen atta iki.fi

# /etc/init.d/autofs restart

Now drives are automatically mounted when you try to access them. You can test it by inserting a cdrom, and cd /mnt/auto/autofs/cdrom. The CDROM is automatically mounted, and ls should show you contents of the cd. When you cd to another directory, such as home directory (cd), CDROM is umounted in four seconds and the eject button in the drive starts working.

To see which drives are mountable (have discs in drive), you can create symlinks (similar to shortcuts) to the mountpoints. You can create the symlinks manually for each drive, for example

# cd /mnt/auto/
# ln -s autofs/cdrom cdrom

This is the first public release of PoMP. We develop an algorithm which minimizes the power consumption for multimedia data playback. We implement the algorithm in mpeg2dec. PoMP uses library of mpeg2dec.

You have to install mpeg2dec to execute PoMP. PoMP controls the disk spindle via standard ATA-4 command. At this moment, we only release Linux binary. The disk scheduling algorithm of PoMP v.0.1 is optimized for IBM microdrive DMDM 10340.

PoMP is tested with IBM micro drive attached via IDE interface(ATA-4). You can type the command as follows. Assume that Microdrive is /dev/hde.

$ ./mpeg2dec -b 1024 /mnt/microdrive/santafe.mpeg /dev/hde

Original Disk Mount Applet is the original disk mount panel applet.

This is the same as the disk mounter included through GNOME 2.8. For GNOME 2.10 the official applet was rewritten, the new version adds the ability to autodetect mountable devices, but drops a significant (all) configurability.

It no longer allows you to choose which devices are displayed on the panel, their order, or icon representation.

Install this applet if you want to restore the old disk mounter behavior for GNOME 2.10.

CD Shell is a scriptable menu system that provides the ability to create interactive multi-boot optical discs. It will make PC-bootable compact discs or DVDs that can select from several program loaders or kernels located on the disc, or boot from other local disk drives that are attached to the system.
This utility is based heavily on concepts pioneered by Bart Lagerweij in his great program Diskem1x. CD Shell provides similar functionality to Diskem1x along with many new original features, such as an advanced scripting language, graphics, and mouse support. It also has the ability to interface with other great programs such as isolinux/memdisk, Ranish Partition Manager, and Memtest86+.
CD Shell is free for non-commercial use. The program and its source code is distributed under the NASM License. The distribution and use of some optional components is restricted by their respective licenses.
Enhancements:
- changed behavior of display.message to interpret a backslash as a single-character quote if not recognized as an escape sequence (suggested by Erwin Veermans of the Ultimate Boot CD project)
- isolinux patches as suggested by Charles Appel of the Ultimage Boot CD project
- patched a bug in isolinux that would display some garbage characters when loading a kernel (just before Ready)
- changed behavior for the display command to not show a splash screen unless isolinux was invoked with an empty command line
- incorporated changes to chooser script
- allow onEscape action when user quits the menu
- allow per-item exececute-on-select commands
- fixed a bug where text in the message window wasnt being updated correctly

mod_dirsize is an Apache module to calculate the disk space used for any virtual host on a server.

The results are displayed in KB using XML.

Duff GTK is a tool to see the disk usage of your folders and files to help you clean up your drive.

Shows the disk usage of a folder using a graphic interface.