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

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

We've got a pair of external firewire drives for backups (a LaCie BigDisk and an IceCube IIRC), and at any given time at least one of them is in a bank vault. We changed to that offsite location when our laptops were stolen the same week there was a burglary at the house we'd previously kept our offsite backup at - fortunately for us the drive was not stolen, though other items from the same room were.

At the moment our backup procedure consists of creating fresh disk images of the contents of our respective home directories, which at 30-80GB is very much a 'start it up before going to bed' procedure, though firewire 800 helps (at least, on J's laptop. Mine is slower). I keep meaning to look into using rsync instead, but have never quite got around to it.

I've transferred a subset of my mp3 collection to work using a 4GB USB key, but that copy is considered entirely expendable, and is not part of my backup strategy.

The rips we've done from our DVD collection and the stuff we've recorded from free to air is as vulnerable as your mp3 collection was. One media drive, not backed up.

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

... the media drive has DVD backups of hard-to-replace stuff, but most of it isn't backed up.