[plug] backing up Linux to Windows

[Brad Campbell]

Denis Brown wrote:

> Leon (and others) -- in your experience just how stable / reliable are 
> the 200GB USB2 drives?   I have always been concerned about the physical 
> handling side... drop a tape acidentally and no worries but drop a whole 
> drive and Boom (tm).   Having said that one of my users here is doing 
> just that on her WinXP machine and so far no tragedies.

We used to use 3 120GB hard disks as a rotating (HA! Geddit?) backup set.
We picked up a cheap camera hard case, filled the inside with reasonably HD foam with cutouts for 
two disks and used that to transport them offsite. One disk lived in the machine and we just brought 
the case in twice a week to rotate the disks. I tested the case with a couple of shockwatch devices 
and old dead hard disks and found that pretty much everything except throwing the case off the first 
floor balcony was pretty much safeish. Not that I'd recommend that, but it was a fun test! It would 
certainly survive being knocked off a desk or equivalent.

I recall in my younger days having a shiny new Syquest SyJet drive and about 4 disks to keep my 
music backups on. I dropped one of the SyJet cartidges one day from about waist height and all the 
data fell off. Not happy.
Actually, that turned out to be a very expensive pig of a drive. Never again!

Brad
-- 
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