Re: 2TB USB hard drive for backing up
On Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:45:34 +0100, Sian Mountbatten wrote:
> On 24/04/12 14:30, Camaleón wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:20:05 +0200, Alberto Fuentes wrote:
>>
>>> On 21/04/12 19:34, Camaleón wrote:
> <snip>
>> Yes, and I'm against partitioning too much but considering the big
>> sizes of the actual hard disks it has become a must, also to minimize a
>> filesystem corruption in a partition that can affect the whole data.
>
> I'm also against partitioning too much. I've had very little trouble
> with hard disk drives over the years; I've certainly had no crashes or
> file corruption.
Yes, but it's dangerous. By not partitioning a tebibyte hard disk we're
exposing gratituously our beloved data.
> Not so long ago, my new SSD failed and I had to re-install the system.
> Unfortunately, I had not backed up all my data, so I lost some.
The first thing a computer user has to learn (and I'm talking in general,
not specifically to you) is "backup, backup and backup". Then you can
start to play and enjoy your system. People tend to treat their computers
like "washing machines" and heck, not, is not the same :-)
> While I wait for the new 2 TB HDD, I am copying data across my home LAN
> to my laptop which has a 120 GB HDD. I was using the WiFi network
> provided by the computer consultants downstairs: it gave me 1.2 MB/s
> transfer rate. When I succeeded in getting the Ethernet working, I got 9
> MB/s. I've now checked the ethernet NICs at both ends and they are both
> Gigabit devices. So I've ordered a 5m Cat5e ethernet cable from Amazon
> which should give me 120 MB/s transfer rate. That would certainly make
> it convenient for security backups.
Yes, and that's why my primary backup is directly attached to one of the
SATA ports of the motherboard: speed between SATA buses is good enough
when using a powerful system. The average size of my /home backup is now
at ~10 GiB and I always do full (not incremental nor differential)
backups becasue 10 GiB is still a manageable size (although for servers
and workstations I do differential backups).
> I've also installed ukopp which looks as though it will do incremental
> backups.
>
> I intend using the 2 TB HDD for three purposes:-
> 1. Full security backups
> 2. Incremental security backups
> 3. Archival backups
>
> Last night, I split two film files into 4 GB pieces and used Brasero to
> write the pieces to 4 DVD+RW discs. So that's another, safe, way of
> backing up my data. I am now going to write my 4.3 GB music collection
> to another DVD+RW disc.
Yes, but I'm very reluctant when it comes to optical media: it's painly
slow, hard to deal with (requires from extra software) and data on them
does not last "forever" despite what advertising says (moreover,
rewritable media has a limited number of writes).
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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