[mdlug] External Hard Drive as Backup

[Peter Bart]

On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 09:47 -0400, 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 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? 
>     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?
> Or must I replicate my partitioning scheme twice over on the 'backup'
> drive? 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?

	Thanks for all the answers and suggestions. I've decided to go with two
320 GB external usb/firewire hard drives
<http://www.simpletech.com/parts/spuf35320.htm>. One for each notebook.
Then format them to my partitioning scheme, load openSUSE 10.3
<http://www.novell.com/communities/node/4536>, then use rsync to
transfer /home. Then use rsync to transfer everything else. From there,
use rsync to transfer /home on a weekly? schedule and the rest on a
monthly? schedule.  The thinking is that if something were to go wrong
with the OS and not get noticed right away it wouldn't necessarily
affect the backup. But /home would be a more recent copy. I am getting
firewire even though it's a security hole, actually both usb and
firewire. I'm using physical security to keep them safe. The rationale
would be once someone has physical access to any device you should
consider it compromised. Hopefully this will allow me to boot almost
immediately from a backup should the primary drive become corrupted,
without having to restore.

Best Regards,
-- 
Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net>
http://petertheplumber.net