Valium hamster lives in a dreamworld, in a cage of his own

[venta]

Well, the hard-drive mentioned in the last post is not looking what you'd call well. Sysadmin #1 has thus far failed to extract anything but melodious beeps from it. Oh, and the odd crunching noise.

Best guess so far is that something has caused the platters to stick, and the inevitable bad shit has ensued. Delicate shaking and tapping have so far failed to free things up; I believe out-and-out brutality is next on the agenda.

Apparently this is a common failure with Maxtor HDs. I didn't know that, and reckon I bought it under the advice of grumblesmurf some years ago. Interestingly, Maxtor apparently claim that their HDs don't bleep, and that it's your PC you're hearing. This is demonstrably a total lie.

So, while not wishing to seem unduly pessimistic, I wondered if anyone wanted to recommend a storage solution to me ?

What do I need... Blimey, HDs have come down in price since I last bought one. So let's assume that size isn't really an issue. The fjord-pining HD was 120Gb and I don't think it was more than half full.

Primarily I listen to mp3s at work (I have the real CDs at home), so I need something that'll plug into my work laptop via USB. If anyone's got any opinions on the virtues of things sold as USB drives (like the Western Digital MyBook) versus just buying a HD and a USB caddy for it, please speak up.

Also, any specific recommendations of makes to go for or to avoid ? Maxtor have incurred my wrath; the caddy also came from what turned out to be a well-dodgy retailer on eBay. It was extremely shoddy, had no ventilation, and an illegal plug, so I won't be doing that again.

And the knotty subject of back-ups. Yes, stable doors, etc. But faced with the task of ripping hundreds of CDs I don't want to do it again again. To me it makes sense to have two HDs, one at home and one at work, thus allowing each to use the other to back up files of all kinds. My home PC is also a laptop, so will probably want some form of external HD as well - but the question is how to transfer easily between them.

Obviously I can, once I've ripped my music, transfer the bulk of it all in one fell swoop. But if I'm adding files to both my home and work HDs, I'll want to do some form of incremental copying of changes in both directions. On the whole, my two laptops are never awake at the same time, and if they were I have no idea how to access one from the other, which makes any form of over-the-air transfer a bit painful. My work laptop goes home each day, so could perhaps transfer some sort of patch in each direction ?

Is this a problem already solved ? My own scripting skills are a bit rubbish, so it might be beyond me to roll my own. Or is there a better approach to ensure I can store masses of files at work, small amounts of files at home, and be reasonably backed up ?

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend going for something relatively cheap and cheerful and just making sure you always have multiple copies.

This is the plan. However, the how of the multiple copies is what's currently baffling me.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I've never been much for clever backup software myself. I favour copying files into directories and copying the directories to the backup device and then calling the job done!

(This only gets messy if you have files which you update often and are fairly large but you don't also want to be holding backups of earlier versions.)

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

As you use Windows I refer you to my previous comment about the Windows Resource Kit Tools. You could plug both your external drives into the same machine periodically and update the mirror from your master copy with a single DOS command. The only real downside to this strategy is that if you unknowingly erase or corrupt files from your master copy you'll end up propagating those problems. As you'll presumably only ever be adding to the mp3 collection you could devise some fairly straightforward script which checksums the files and diffs the results against the last run (which should show up only the additions you've made in the meantime) before you make a backup.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

(The bit about checking the drive integrity is possibly overkill in this case. If a file gets corrupted you'll notice eventually and you'll still have the original CD to restore from.)

BTW - this business with having a master / backup drive is probably most useful if you want to be able to access your CD collection on your PC at home as well as work. If you don't then our work notebooks can write DVDs so you could just backup to them - having essentially the same setup as you used to use, with DVDs to restore from if needed.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I had considered just writing mp3s to DVD. However, I acknowledge that I'm pretty poor about backing up files at home as well, and though there are far fewer of them I'd probably be more upset if they were lost. There are plenty of solutions for backing up a few text files, but I don't do them. Hence the wish to evolve some sort of system to ensure I actually do my backing-up.

Thanks also for your emails about drives and such.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

I have a slightly different strategy for backing up system drives on my non-server (Windows) PCs at home; it may be a more useful one to consider for your notebook backups. The problem here is not only the possibility of a drive failure, there is also the strong liklihood of Windows getting itself in a complete mess. Rebuilding a Windows PC takes ages what with all the Windows updates, configuration and reinstallation of apps that you have to do. What I do here is obtain a second drive of the same type and connect it via a USB adaptor (essentially an external case without the actual case) and use a program called Casper XP (a cheaper thing that does the same thing as Norton Ghost - hence the name!) to make an exact clone of the drive, and then store it away somewhere safely. If needed the backup drive can then be swapped in to restore the machine to the last "good" state. However, I don't update this clone very often and still use a separate backup policy of periodically mirroring important directories onto my server (or an external USB drive would do) more frequently.

Going slightly off at a tangent, has anyone here used a NAS device rather than a USB-connected external drive? A problem I have is that my desktop PCs are running Windows and the servers Linux, and they handle timestamping differently. There is a different granularity in the times stored but robocopy has an option (/fft) which makes it allow up to a 2s difference in modification times to be considered "equal" which resolves that. The problem comes when the clocks change - they handle this differently and see a 1 hour difference in modification times between pre-existing and identical files, so _everything_ gets updated. Now, NAS devices generally seem to run Linux and use the Linux ext3 filesystem so I presume would have the same issue, but can anyone confirm this?