advice on external HD

[dbaker]

wow, for some reason I never got notifications for this thread and completely missed all the activity.
anyway, I got a HD...
It's a WD elements, 2 TB. I did a lot of reading around and saw more people having success with it on Linux than the Passport Ultra (probably cause it's a more basic model). It was cheaper too. I formatted it as ext4 and immediately afterwards it thrashed a bit, but after unplugging and plugging back in a few times it settled down and seems fine now. I've backed everything up on it already, it's super fast.
will keep you posted on how it goes!

[millusions]

Indeed
http://www.australiangeographic.com....ls-the-top-30/

Before the property prices went nuts I was really considering Perth WA, the weather, the food...

It's not all bad, you have this supposedly dangerous creatures, but if you look at statistics of people actually hurt by these creatures you come to the conclusion that its actually quite safe here.

check out Sydney real estate, it has over taken insane a long time ago, you can buy a garage for less than 0.5 million.

[GerardV]

Did you mean Bill Bryson?

Sorry of course i did

[life0riley]

It is a long way from anywhere, closer to Singapore that Sydney!

If you really want to get a good perspective of how big this place is, apart from going around it yourself, is to read Bill Bryon's book " Down Under" , an fantastic and hilarious read.

Did you mean Bill Bryson?

[GerardV]

Most Australians say "great place, but too far from Australia".

It is a long way from anywhere, closer to Singapore that Sydney!

If you really want to get a good perspective of how big this place is, apart from going around it yourself, is to read Bill Bryon's book " Down Under" , an fantastic and hilarious read.

[jlittle]

... I was really considering Perth WA...

Most Australians say "great place, but too far from Australia".

[millusions]

I would love to use the Amazon drive,
the problem is that in Australia bandwidth is measured, if i was to upload my itunes there that would take 2/3 of monthly allowance,, about 90 gigs.

but we have great beaches, and other stuffs

[SteveRiley]

Another possible event is a burglary, and original and back-ups gone. I worked with an otherwise extremely smart chap who worked on a side project for two years and lost it all that way.

Amazon S3 to the rescue. Create an AWS account, create an S3 bucket, and install the package s3cmd. Run:

s3cmd --configure

and answer the questions. Provide your AWS access key (like an account ID) and your secret key (like an account password). Supply an encryption password (will be used locally by GPG to encrypt files before they're uploaded). Answer yes when asked whether to use HTTPS (good for authenticating the real S3 and not something trying to spoof it). Keep a copy of the resulting ~/.s3cfg file, as it contains the GPG password -- you do not want to forget this!

Then put the following in a file in /etc/cron.daily or /etc/cron.hourly, whichever you prefer:

s3cmd sync --encrypt --recursive --delete-removed [i]/path/to/important/stuff/[/i] s3://[i]bucket-name[/i] >/dev/null

[millusions]

i dont call it backup,
just multiple copies to me,
like ITunesLibrary, minimum 3 copies excluding the iphone/ipad,
1 in itunes
2 a copy on another pc
3 external hdd copy
4 not counted - iphone 64GB



so lightning strike that buddy

[jlittle]

I seem to read here some people use external HD's for back-up and have them (semi) permanently hooked up.

One lightning strike or other electrical spike will destroy your original and back-up!

Another possible event is a burglary, and original and back-ups gone. I worked with an otherwise extremely smart chap who worked on a side project for two years and lost it all that way.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I seem to read here some people use external HD's for back-up and have them (semi) permanently hooked up.

One lightning strike or other electrical spike will destroy your original and back-up!

Yes, indeed! But once that happens to someone, it [most likely] will never happen again.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Over the years I've used hard drive enclosures, i.e., just an enclosure that I stuck my own hard drive in. Now I've segued to all-in-one thingies. I recently purchased two external, USB Transcend drives, each of which is 1TB and has military grade drop/shock resistance. I'm extremely pleased with them [so far!]. Here they are on Amazon:

Transcend StoreJet 25H3B
Transcend StoreJet 25M3

For their price, I think they're great. I formatted mine as ext4, since they shipped as FAT32 and I'm not willing to lose case sensitivity on file names.

[woodsmoke]

Hi
I purchased a cheapo usb external "disk enclosure" back in....don't know.... 2006?...

It is not nearly as complex as the diescription in the Wikipedia article but it appears something like this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_enclosure

Over the years I then purchased a variety of "small" hard drives to plug into it, and have never had a failure, although I did once, inadvertently format one of the things.

My former inconvenience, however, had a purpose purchased external in a very nice enclosure and it failed due to heat.

i leave the top of the case off. and change the drives as needed to...

a) general, short term before backing up to a cd.
b) pictures
d) documents
e) older long term storage.

Anyhow, the older drives are going the way of the dodo bird, so they should be cheap to pick up untill they are all moved offshore from the U.S. (it forces up the onshore market prices! )

What I particularly do is;

a) always store immediate stuff on a usb.
b) frequently just drag and drop from usb to the short term hard drive,
c) regularly move all files then to a cd or dvd and I also do the cds / dvds according to type, pictures / documents / with date

OH and yes, I just format to ext4, I used to always use FAT.

just some thoughts

woodsmoke

[millusions]

one reason i have ext4 on externals is to preserve file permissions to backups without needing to gzip everything,
yes it did cross my mind to do everything ntfs for compatibility

[perspectoff]

Seagate 2 Tb Slim

I have 2 of the Seagate Slim 2 TB non-powered USB drives, which I picked up at Best Buy for $119 (one was $100 on sale). They are NTFS, but Dolphin mounts and uses them automatically without problems, and I almost exclusively use them with Kubuntu.

I have both (just about) filled with hundreds of movies / TV shows. Love 'em, especially for travel, since they fit in my pocket.

One I share with my kids, who use Windows (hence the NTFS). One became slightly corrupted in a power failure, but the Windows utility chkdsk /f /r fixed it up promptly (where /f indicates to fix errors and /r indicates to relocate bad blocks).

A friend uses a smaller-capacity one with her Apple Macbook, but of course it doesn't work as well (nothing Apple works very well these days since Apple cripples all their software on purpose) and, of course, is much more expensive. I haven't tried her Mac version with Kubuntu...

I also have a separate powered Seagate 2 TB USB drive ($69 at Target) which I leave connected directly to my smart TV or DVD player and can play movies (or music or photos) directly from it. DVDs are pretty much a quaint and distant memory.