Strategy

The strategy for multi-CD backup (e.g., soap series) is to use rar command plus par's recovery-volume feature.

Current situation is that if one bit in a file is wrong, the whole file is not usable any more. So the smaller the file is, the less impact a damage will be. Yet we have to think of the trade off between small file size and the great number of files. Also note the rar's 255-volume limitation. Considering both minimizing the damage, and rar's limitation, the best volume size is 5M.

For extreme big series, do not create a many-volume CD backup with only one rar series. Group them into no-more-than-one-CD archives (5M each), and stack them into CDROMs. Since both the archive volumes and recovery volumes are 5M, you don't need to worry about grouping/splitting them into just the disk capability. So you normally reserve 2 CD's free HD space for extracting them (one to cache compressed volumes, the other for the expended space), instead of trying hard to squeeze out 5 or 10 times than that.

Use par to create recovery volumes. Do not use rar.