[mdlug] External Hard Drive as Backup

[Aaron Kulkis]

Peter Bart wrote:
> Hello All,
>     I've decided to at least get an inexpensive hard drive for around
> $150-$200 that holds at least 500gig to be used to sync two notebooks
> too. I almost bought an external  Buffalo drive with usb and firewire.
> Then I saw a review that claimed the drive itself was simply a
> repackaged Western Digital. I don't really want one of those. Am I down
> to buying a sata drive and an enclosure? Does firewire offer higher
> speeds than usb

Slightly, but that's not the bottleneck, so it doesn't matter.

 > or can I open my options a little by dispensing with
> firewire? Should I consider paying a little more and getting a NAS with
> ethernet?

Personally, I would get a NAS enclosure, or a small NAS, take
out the drive for use as an internal drive, and replace that
drive with a larger drive, then use it as your backup device
for all the computers in the house.

>     Once I get one, how should I format it so I would be able to sync
> two notebooks with /root, /boot, /usr, /swap, /var, /tmp, /opt
> and /home partitions. Just two ext3 partitions, one for each notebook?

One big filesysetm, and individual partitions can be stored in
their own directories.

> Or must I replicate my partitioning scheme twice over on the 'backup'
> drive?

Why would you do that?


 >It would also be nice to be able to boot directly from the
> 'backup' drive via usb or other, must I do something special for that to
> happen?
> 
> Best Regards,