Today we unearthed yet another old CD-ROM. We used to backup all our family photos and videos onto CDs and DVDs in the good old days of slow ADSL connections and expensive or non-existent cloud storage.
These days, when I come across these CDs and DVDs, I use this quick hack to send them into the cloud.
Step 1
Pop them into a DVD or CD reader. I have one attached to my trusty Fedora laptop.
Step 2
Determine the Linux device file for the DVD/CD reader.
In my case, the CD/DVD auto-mounts. So a simple ‘df ‘ gives the device name /dev/sr0 – highlighted in the transcript below.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 4.0M 0 4.0M 0% /dev
tmpfs 1.9G 5.0M 1.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 763M 1.8M 761M 1% /run
/dev/dm-0 118G 113G 4.3G 97% /
tmpfs 1.9G 92K 1.9G 1% /tmp
/dev/dm-0 118G 113G 4.3G 97% /home
/dev/sda2 974M 201M 706M 23% /boot
/dev/sda1 599M 14M 585M 3% /boot/efi
tmpfs 382M 160K 381M 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sr0 552M 552M 0 100% /run/media/user1/PhotoCD1
$
Step 3
Use ‘dd’ to copy the CD/DVD’s contents onto a location on your computer.
‘dd’ is part of the GNU Coreutils package and should be installed by default on every Linux instance.
$ dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/home/user1/PhotoCD1.img bs=2048
282424+0 records in
282424+0 records out
578404352 bytes (578 MB, 552 MiB) copied, 237.454 s, 2.4 MB/s
$
Note that specifying the block size of the transfer using ‘bs=2048’ is optional. It simply refers to the block size you want to use to buffer your I/O transfer. The operating system should auto-select this. I chose to do it out of (old-school) habit because /dev/sr0 was reporting a 2048-byte optimal I/O size (see highlighted lines):
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sr0
Disk /dev/sr0: 551.61 MiB, 578404352 bytes, 282424 sectors
Disk model: DVDRW DU8A6SH
Units: sectors of 1 * 2048 = 2048 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 2048 bytes / 2048 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 2048 bytes / 2048 bytes
$
Step 4
Do with the resultant ‘virtual’ CD/DVD (/home/user1/PhotoCD1.img in the example above) as you will.
I usually confirm first that it is what I think it is:
$ file /home/user1/PhotoCD1.img
/home/user1/PhotoCD1.img: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'PhotoCD1'
$
Then I test mounting it to and navigating to it on my laptop (double-clicking in your default file manager program should do the trick, then examine its contents).
Finally I copy it to my chosen online backup storage.