It crashes (locks up/ceases to respond) when trying to do the same backup to: system:/media/sda5/Backup !!
Well I thought the above indicated a problem when trying to back up to a HDD. Sure looks that way to me.
If you wish to write to a RW media then that media must have a file system on it and be mounted as RW by the user.
Usually that means putting a UDF filesystem on a DVD RW and writing to that.
As far as I am aware Rsync cannot write to block devices ...... it needs the file system in place. I guess the same applies to DrakBackup .......
You've lost me now ... file system? Mounted by the user?
The DVD+RW had been formatted with InCD on an XP machine, so it does have a file system on it.
The concept of putting a file system on a DVD-R is quite beyond me. How can you have a file
system on blank -R media?
K3 seems to be able to use the device with +R media, why not the others?
All newbie questions I'm afraid.
Any media formatted with a proprietary Windows application file system is not likely to work with a standards compliant Linux system. You can't put a file system on a DVD-R without that process being considered a burn process, with which a DVD-R gets only one, resulting in a non writable disk.
You can backup to compressed archive files of your choice, then copy those archive files to a DVD disk, or simply copy the uncompressed files to a DVD disk, to back them up. You don't need a "backup" application to do the latter, just k3b. You are trying to make a very simple process overly complicated.
How about just telling us what end result you want, and letting us explain how to get that result. 
I was simply trying to use the application provided to make a backup.
In the end I was successful in making a live CD, which will only run on the PCLinuxOS machine, but that is no great problem. That was done the usual way: get MakeLiveCD to make an .ISO (less /home) then burn that to a DVD+R with K3b and also to copy the .ISO to a large HDD on a Windows machine on the network.
/home was then written out to the second HD on the PCLos system using Grsync as well as being backed up on the Windows machine. Belt-and-braces approach.
What puzzles me is that Drakbackup sees the DVD writer (not just the media in it) as a ROM device, while K3b is able to use it normally - except that K3b won't format read/write media, only erase. I take it from this that Linux is unable to treat RW media in the same way as InCD does, i.e. as media which can be written to on the fly, just like a hard drive or pen-drive.
I have now achieved the result I want; perhaps I expected too much of Drakbackup. My query wasn't so much that I couldn't make a backup, but rather some concern that some applications were treating a RW device as a ROM device. Grsync sees it as a ROM drive as well.
