On Aug 11, 2008, at 4:25 PM, Brian Wells wrote:
I'm looking at an alternative utility, svn-backup-dumps, in the samepackage. I could do ~800 full backups, or many more incremental backupswith a full backup here and there, before running out of space. That would only write most blocks once or twice, and once it filled up Icould erase old backups with only one write and reuse it, right? (If I do this, should I reformat to FAT so the controllers won't be confused?)
The inodes are going to be your problem in an ext3 filesystem, not the data blocks. Keep that in mind. So you should be trying to control the number of writes per inode. One way to get a better handle on that is by using the "noatime" mount option. Or switching to FAT, if your backup system supports FAT as a destination filesystem.
USB flash drives are not expensive -- cdw.com advertises a variety of 4GB drives for US$15-$20, and they aren't the cheapest by a good shot. No matter what you finally wind up doing, I'd still plan to replace the flash drive at least once a year. That works out to about 5 US cents/day.
Rick