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Seagate 160 GB SATA HARD DRIVE PCB

A

Arfa Daily

Jan 1, 1970
0
Meat Plow said:
Good story and references Arf. I keep nothing but an operating system and
temporary data on the drive in my PC. My data is stored on a network
storage server (Linksys NSLU2) utilizing two 300 gig drives, one of which
is hidden. Every morning at 3 am, a changed file and incremental backup
from the visible to hidden drive occurs automatically. Should the visable
drive fail (has happened once in the past 3 years) I merely make the
hidden drive the main drive (plug it into USB port 1) and all my data is
there. Then I replace the hidden drive and life goes on all happy happy.
If perhaps the NSLU2 itself were to fail, I have purchased another just in
case. If I had not done that, the file system is a linux ext2 IIRC and all
data could be transferred effortlessly to this PC. Ive got about 450 bucks
into this strategy to maintain the integrity of my critical data and it is
as good a solution as you will find anywhere at any price. There is one
drawback that being network transfer rates. Even at switched 10/100, large
files take awhile to transfer but I don't store a lot of those. I store
and actively work on mostly pictures from my digital camera, my email
database, and documents I have created or modified. Somehow speed is of
little concern because I'm sure that when catastrophe strikes, I grab a
drive cloned with my operating system off the shelf and I'm back in
business in less than 10 minutes. I really cringe when I see people
storing hundreds gigs worth of data on there only PC hard disk. At the
very least buy an external USB drive people.

It's a simple USB drive that I use for backup, and mine takes place
automatically every morning at 3:15am. I actually had to alter the partion
sizes on it after I replaced the data drive with the big one, because
without really thinking about it too clearly, I created a 'data' and a
'spare' partition on the new drive, that were just a little larger than the
partitions that I had already on the backup drive, so of course, the first
time the new drive with its restored data on, came to be backed up, the
backup software rejected the operation, because the destination partition
just wasn't quite big enough by a few hundred meg, to accommodate the source
drive. Doh! Still, it was just a case of reformat the external drive with
partitions that were big enough, plus a bit to allow for future bad blocks,
and then creating a new backup set, and then restarting the backup
scheduler. Know what you mean about the speed though. It took it 21 hours to
transfer all the data back to the USB drive. Just a few minutes a night
again now, as only the changed files / folders get included.

Arfa
 
J

Joe Kappus

Jan 1, 1970
0
case. If I had not done that, the file system is a linux ext2 IIRC and

Why ext2 and not a journaling filesystem with better recovery tools (ie.
ext3 or xfs)? I would surely think if you had powerloss or if the usb
host died you would get some dataloss.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
Why ext2 and not a journaling filesystem with better recovery tools (ie.
ext3 or xfs)? I would surely think if you had powerloss or if the usb
host died you would get some dataloss.

Probably is ext3 and an error on my part.
 
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