[plug] formatting new external usb hardrive

[Gavin Chester]

On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 07:11, William Kenworthy wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 19:18 +0800, Sol wrote:
> 
> Personnel comment - avoid ext3 if theres any chance of a premature
> powerdown/unplug: I changed back to reiserfs, and after a couple of
> crashes/resets theres still no errors, unlike what has happened with
> ext3.  ext3 has a data=journelled option which may help in some cases.

Good tip, thanks.  Since enjoying the benefits of ext3 over ext2 I have
become blinkered to other filesystems. 

> I found rsync did not work well in the context of full system backups.
> It ran out of memory very quickly with many thousands of files and also
> took a long time.  Use "unison" which uses the rsync protocol, but makes
> better use of it for this purpose.  

I seem to remember, from a period lurking on the rsync list, that the
rule of thumb with it is that you need twice the size of the backup/copy
volume/files on the target disk for the temporary file writes before
rsync completes. 

HTH, Gavin.