mimic-shiny-circles: Overcomplicated system for the simple task of archiving CD-ROMs

mimic-shiny-circles is a method for archiving CD-ROMs. The underlying philosophy of this tool is to use extract the contents of a CD-ROM twice using 2 dfferent optical drives in order to increase confidence that the extracted bits are correct. Then it stores disc metadata in Amazon Web Services DynamoDB.

Components

• cdinfo2json.c: A C program tailored for Linux that reads a compact disc's table of contents and outputs pertinent disc information in JSON format.
• rip_cd.py: A Python program which extracts the data from a CD-ROM. It uses the Linux dd command to
• mimic_shiny_circles.py: The core program that leverages rip_cd.py in order to extract 2 CD-ROMs at a time. When the program successfully extracts a pair of discs using 2 different optical drives, it uses AWS SQS to log work for later processing.
• process_pair.py: This program requests messages that were logged by mimic_shiny_circles.py and verifies that pairs of CD-ROM rips are identical. If they identical, move one copy (along with a metadata file that includes the confirmed SHA-1 checksum) to a final archival location.

Setup

• Compile cdinfo2json: gcc -Wall cdinfo2json.c -o cdinfo2json
• Create a Python3 virtualenv: virtualenv -p python3 py3-flask
• Activate virtualenv: source py3-flask/bin/activate
• Install Python requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
• Configure a YAML file that specifies a pair of optical drives for processing. Use config-pair.yml.example as an example.
• Configure a YAML file that specifies the pair processing step. Use config-post-processing.yml.example as an example.

Running

• Activate virtualenv: source py3-flask/bin/activate
• Extract a pair of CD-ROMs using 2 different drives: python mimic_shiny_circles.py config-pair-1.yml
• Process the pair and log data into DynamoDB: python process_pair.py config-post-processing.yml

Demonstration

Since it's unlikely that anyone who isn't the original project's author will ever use this, please enjoy this asciinema recording of the system in action.