Although we are inevitably moving towards a future where all information will be contained in the cloud, even today it may be interesting to preserve certain data on physical media such as compact discs. The cheapening of hosting services makes that it is less and less worthwhile to invest in physical means, Which are fragile and do not offer the same guarantees of availability over time as those.
In this guide we explain how to burn the image to a disk or USB memory from the Ubuntu operating system. Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
1. Check the integrity of your image
Data corruption is a problem that especially affects files downloaded from the Internet and it would be a shame to waste a record for that reason. To verify the integrity of the image that we are going to burn we will proceed to carry out, prior to the recording, a check of the same.
To perform the verification we will show you two commands based on different digital summaries (MD5 and SHA256) the result must match the one provided by whom the image is provided to you (usually indicated on the website itself from where you download). Although this data is not always available, it is advisable to compare it whenever possible.
Without going into commenting on the differences between the different digital summary algorithms, in practice we can use one or the other indiscriminately since both they will offer us sufficient security to verify correct integrity from our image file:
md5sum nombre_de_la_imagen.iso
or
sha256sum nombre_de_la_imagen.iso
In both cases the result will be a text string alphanumeric with the summary of the image the value must match what is indicated. Don’t worry about copying integer, as the slightest alteration (single bit) would make the resulting summary completely different. en this link you can check the hashes of the different images of Ubuntu-based distributions.
2. Burn the image to a compact disc
Unlike current data that is stored on a computer, an image file cannot be dumped directly onto a disk. It needs to be recorded using a special program that expands / extracts its content on a medium and makes it readable by the computer. To perform this step we will insert a blank disk with enough capacity to contain the data of the image and we will right-click on the file and choose the option that indicates Burn to disc …
We recommend that you use single write disks whenever possible, as they are the cheapest alternative for storing your information on this medium.
3. Record the image on a flash drive
Finally, if you prefer to record the image on a flash drive that you can reuse as many times as you want, you must run the following command:
sudo dd if=nombre_de_la_imagen.iso of=/dev/dispositivo_pendrive
If you do not know the path of your USB memory stick, you can use the following command to list those disks on your system:
sudo fdisk -l
